Dorothea Erxleben Researchers' Award for Silke Meiners

The Excellence Cluster "Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation" (PMI) has awarded three Dorothea Erxleben Women Researchers' Awards to outstanding female scientists in the field of inflammation research. The researchers honored this year will receive funding of €100,000, €50,000, and €50,000 respectively. The awards ceremony took place on November 9, 2023, during the "Sex and Gender Aspects in Precision Medicine" symposium organized by the PMI Excellence Cluster at the Atlantic Hotel in Kiel. Professor Simone Fulda, President of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU), and her counterpart Professor Gabriele Gillessen-Kaesbach from the University of Lübeck (UzL) presented the awards to the winners: Prof. Silke Szymczak (UzL), Prof. Sabrina Jabs (CAU), and DZL scientist Prof. Silke Meiners (Research Center Borstel/CAU).

Meiners, Leibniz Professor at the Medical Faculty of the CAU and research group leader at the Research Center Borstel, Leibniz Lung Center, received a Dorothea Erxleben Women Researchers' Award with a prize of €50,000. Meiners conducts research on proteasomes, structures that break down damaged, old, or unnecessary proteins in cells, allowing for the production of new proteins. Silke Meiners is particularly interested in immunoproteasomes, which occur in immune cells and are also activated in cells infected with viruses, for example. Fragments of proteins cleaved by the immunoproteasome are presented as antigens on the cell surface of infected cells. Certain immune cells, cytotoxic T cells, recognize these antigens as foreign to the immune system and subsequently destroy the infected cell. Thus, immunoproteasomes are important for the immune system. At the same time, they play a central role in the development of autoimmune reactions and diseases, where the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's own structures.

Lung fibrosis, a rare but very severe disease that often leads to death within a few years, may also belong to these autoimmune diseases. "We have detected molecular markers in the cells of the scarred lung tissue of these patients, indicating that both the immunoproteasome and cytotoxic T cells are active there," says DZL researcher Meiners. In the project funded by the award, Meiners, together with other cluster members, aims to further investigate these T cells: "Using modern sequencing techniques, we want to analyze which antigens the cytotoxic T cells in the lung tissue of patients with fibrosis react to, contributing to the destruction of lung tissue." This could provide clues to the cause of an autoimmune reaction, such as a past viral infection. Furthermore, it is possible that not all patients are equally involved in the disease by the immunoproteasome, which Meiners also wants to find out. "It is possible to inhibit the immunoproteasome. If we know who is crucially involved in the immunoproteasome, we could offer these patients a new targeted therapy," explains Meiners. Such inhibitors are already in clinical testing for other diseases. "It is still a long way off for use in lung fibrosis, but it is a promising approach," says Meiners.

"I am delighted to congratulate this year's award winners on their achievements. They show that scientific excellence, especially from female researchers, requires excellent conditions, as exemplified by our PMI Excellence Cluster, which has been developed with exemplary leadership for the entire CAU," emphasizes Prof. Simone Fulda, President of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität, during the award ceremony.

"The Dorothea Erxleben Women Researchers' Awards give the winners the opportunity to dedicate themselves intensively to their own research. They have become an important instrument for promoting women in science as effectively as possible. The achievements of all three awardees impress me; they are all shining examples of successful female researchers," says Prof. Gabriele Gillessen-Kaesbach, President of the University of Lübeck.

The Women Researchers' Awards are part of the Dorothea Erxleben Equality Program of the Cluster, the funding program for greater equality in clinics and research. They are exclusively awarded to female scientists from the cluster with the aim of supporting their excellent research activities in the field of inflammation research and thereby increasing their competitiveness in the competition for funding. The awards have been presented for the third time, initially announced in 2017 by the predecessor cluster "Inflammation at Interfaces." The award is named after Dorothea Christiane Erxleben, who, in the mid-18th century, became the first woman in Germany to earn a medical degree and practice as a physician.