Focus on women's health: Freising scientist researches chronic inflammatory diseases

Created: 05/23/2022, 12:00 p.m

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Melanie Schirmer was honored by the European Research Council.

Minister of State Florian Herrmann congratulates the Freising researcher.

Photo: State Chancellery © State Chancellery

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Melanie Schirmer researches chronic inflammatory diseases in Freising - and focuses primarily on women.

Now she is receiving a special award.

Freising

– It has been shown repeatedly which top scientists work at the research location Freising: An outstanding researcher is Dr.

Melanie Schirmer.

The bioinformatician, who researches chronic inflammatory diseases at the TU, has now been awarded an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council.

As a result, the 38-year-old will receive funding for her project of 1.5 million euros over five years.

In an interview, she explains how her work contributes to making women and diseases specific to women in medicine and science more visible - and ultimately to being able to help them better.

Ms. Schirmer, scientific research is usually not that easy to understand for non-specialists.

How do you explain what you do to laypeople?

Basically, the research of my working group revolves around the human microbiome: It is about the microorganisms that are settled on and in our body, for example in the mouth or in the intestine.

We look at the role these microorganisms play in our health.

In particular, we focus on the role of the microbiome in chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, and autoimmune diseases.

It is already known that the microbiome changes in connection with these diseases, but it is unclear to what extent these changes are causal for the diseases.

Also, we know that many of these conditions tend to affect women more, but we don't know why.

One possible reason is hormones

which are very different for women and men.

We will look at how exactly the hormones interact with the microbiome and contribute to these diseases - the ERC Starting Grant is now enabling us to do this.

What is behind this award from the European Research Council?

This research council is an institution that promotes basic research - including with the Starting Grants.

This year, 4,000 researchers from all over the world applied.

Ten percent of them received funding of up to 1.5 million euros for their respective project.

(By the way: everything from the region is now also available in our regular Freising newsletter.)

How does this money benefit your research?

This grant enables me to establish this new research area of ​​hormone-microbiome interactions with my group.

This is particularly important because historically, women have been underrepresented in many scientific studies, with data often based on male cells, male mice, and males.

This means that important differences between men and women have been neglected so far.

Because understanding the causes of the over-representation of women in chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases is also an opportunity to develop better treatment approaches for these diseases.

We will first look at hormone-microbiome interactions in healthy women, including the impact of hormonal birth control methods,

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How do you go about your work?

Put simply, it works like this: We work with clinics to collect samples from patients related to specific diseases.

We are doing this, for example, in cooperation with the LMU hormone and fertility center in Munich for our study on female infertility.

Then we use so-called multiomics techniques to create microbiome profiles.

Using this data, we can identify potential human-microbe interactions that play a role in these diseases.

With these hypotheses, we then go back to the laboratory to continue researching the disease mechanisms via the microbes.

If this is successful, new therapeutic approaches can be considered.

You can find more current news from the district of Freising at Merkur.de/Freising.