Early March, Universitätsklinikum Hamburg Eppendorf (UKE) facilitated a workshop to familiarize clinical researchers with HALRIC. More than 20 people attended and gained insight into the pilot project programme, the partner institutions, and the various infrastructure offerings within the Hanseatic Life Science Research Infrastructure Consortium.
“With the workshop I think we have laid an important first stone in our efforts to run some HALRIC pilot projects in cooperation with clinical researchers at UKE, commented Jakob Øster, Rigshospitalet. Together with his fellow HALRIC Ambassador, Steffi Tille, he supported Vice Dean and HALRIC Joint-Steering-Committee member Götz Thomalla to plan and vividly moderate the workshop.
The first HALRIC pilot-project involving clinical researchers from Rigshospitalet addresses the feasibility of using Micro-CT to optimize surgical precision in oral cancer. It kicked off in February when it was also featured in the hospital magazine reaching 12.000 employees: Danske forskere får adgang til den helt store lup // ”Vi vil gerne fjerne alt kræftvæv i første forsøg”
Back in Hamburg, the afternoon kicked off with excellent speakers from DESY (Johanna Hakanpää), European XFEL (Thomas Feurer) and the Technical University of Denmark (Anders Bjorholm Dahl), who presented various infrastructure offerings and showed how the technologies can provide a fuller picture to for example visualize cells, tissue and protein structures.
Samuel Huber from UKE further presented his group’s research in inflammatory-bowel-disease (IBD) – a chronic disease that 2 million Europeans are already suffering from. In collaboration with DESY and University of Hamburg the researchers have used X-Ray Fluorescence Imaging to track in vivo immune cells in mice and Samuel explained how future clinical applications of the XFI technique could enable early detection of IBD, as well as help the differentiation between Celiac Disease and colorectal cancer.
If you are curious to find out more about collaborating in a pilot project with HALRIC partners, you can find out more HERE