Prof. Klaus Schulze-Osthoff

Tumor cells contain 60-80 mutations that enable their sustained proliferation and cause therapy resistance to most current treatments. Two hallmarks involved in tumorigenesis and treatment resistance are disturbances in important cellular processes such as apoptosis and senescence. The primary focus of our lab is the dissection of the molecular components that orchestrate cell death processes and cellular senescence, in order to define potential targets and to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment.

To this end, we

• investigate several regulators of apoptosis and alternate cell death modes,
• characterize cellular senescence as a tumor suppressor and immune-modulatory mechanism,
• explore new regulators of transcription factor NF-κB,
• study the involvement of stress pathways in the reprogramming of differentiated cells to induced pluripotent stem cells,
• elucidate the correlation between DNA damage, DNA repair, stem cell differentiation and cell death,
• conduct translational projects using novel biomarkers of cell death and senescence for monitoring anticancer treatment and tissue damage.

To achieve our goals, we employ methods of molecular and cell biology, biochemistry and immunology, including RNA interference, gene and protein expression profiling, life-cell imaging and whole animal models.

Jobs

We are always interested in motivated MSc students, PhD students or Postdocs who like to join our group. Please contact Prof. Dr. Klaus Schulze-Osthoff.

Recent News

• Simon Lehle was awarded the "Innovation Grant" of Tübingen University for the development and valorization of a new sequence-specific method to detect and quantify DNA damage (2013).
• Klaus Schulze-Osthoff has been appointed a "DKFZ Fellow" and is now affiliated to the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg (2013).