Scientific Focus

Dr. Anke Fähnrich is a trained biochemist, and her research focuses on Systems Medicine approaches to personalized oncology and translational research in single-cell transcriptomics. As such, she is the bioinformatics head of the Molecular Tumor Board of the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein and head of the single-cell transcriptome service unit of the University, offering services from experimental design, library preparation to bioinformatics analysis. Together with researchers from the German Centers for Lung Research (DZL), Infection Research (DZIF), and Cardiovascular Research (DZHK), has been able to show how the coronavirus damages blood vessels in the brain in a study recently published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. For the first time, single-cell sequencing data analyzed by her revealed a mechanism of how Sars-CoV-2 directly damages the microvessels in the brain. In other cooperation’s within the CRC 1526 ‘Pathomechanisms of Antibody-mediated Autoimmunity (PANTAU) – Insights from Pemphigoid Diseases’ my research group will focus on the single-cell analysis of large scale datasets, including single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) and immune receptor repertoire results (iii) to employ systems medicine approaches for functional analyses, and (iv) to integrate datasets and results across omics layers and finally across experiments and projects.