Ping Shen Receives Klaus Tschira Boost Fund for Osteoarthritis Research
Dr. Ping Shen from the Pitzer Laboratory for Osteoarthritis Research at the DRFZ has been awarded funding from the Klaus Tschira Boost Fund to research the causes of osteoarthritis. This award is particularly noteworthy as less than 5% of the submitted applications were approved.
The researcher from Prof. Dr. Max Löhning’s research group is investigating the mechanisms that contribute to the development of osteoarthritis – a chronic joint disease that affects around 600 million people worldwide. The underlying causes for the disease are not yet fully understood, and there is currently no cure. The aim of Ping Shen’s project is to better understand the disease processes and thereby create a scientific basis for new approaches to enable better diagnosis and treatment of patients.
For a long time, osteoarthritis was understood primarily as a purely “wear and tear” disease. As a result, the possible influence of the immune system—in particular certain immune cells (T and B lymphocytes)—was long underestimated. However, Dr. Shen and colleagues found evidence that these cells do contribute to the disease: in their studies, mice lacking T and B lymphocytes were significantly better protected against age-related osteoarthritis.
In humans with osteoarthritis, certain T lymphocytes also multiply particularly rapidly in the affected joint, suggesting that the immune system is specifically active in the disease processes there. In her two-year project, Dr. Shen will investigate the role of T lymphocytes in the development and progression of osteoarthritis, with the aim of translating this knowledge into new approaches for better diagnosis and treatment strategies in the long term.
Klaus Tschira Boost Fund
The Klaus Tschira Boost Fund supports researchers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and computer science who want to develop their scientific work and careers more independently and flexibly. The funding provides freely available resources to create time and scope for their own projects—especially for bold, higher-risk, or interdisciplinary projects. Dr. Shen’s project is being funded with about €100.000.
Pitzer Laboratory for Ostheoarthritis Research
