Forschungsschwerpunkte
Surgical Oncology
The challenge of modern oncologic surgery is to personalize the intervention to the individual patient and to eliminate any residual tumor after surgery by specific adjuvant oncologic therapies. To achieve these goals, it is necessary to have reliable prognostic predictors at hand and to unravel molecular mechanisms that drive tumor growth. In our laboratory, we investigate aberrant gene expression patterns and tumor/progenitor signal transduction pathways to develop innovative diagnostic methods and identify potential targets for selective tumor therapies.
Organ Recovery Unit
Our organ recovery unit envisions the preconditioning, testing and eventually treatment of donor organs prior to transplantation. For this purpose, hypothermic and normothermic, oxygenated machine perfusion of donor grafts is applied. The normothermic, oxygenated perfusion also serves as a platform for the pretreatment of donor organs. Our long-term goal is to immunologically reprogram donor organs ex vivo to achieve local organ acceptance.
Digital Surgery
The future of surgery will be increasingly digital. robotic, (mixed) virtual reality and image-guided surgery are increasingly finding their way into patient care. Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for prediction and therapy guidance. Our laboratory is addressing the challenges of the Future OR in various projects and is developing AI-based algorithms for organ allocation.
