Kaiserslauterner student wins Best Poster Award for innovative research!

Kaiserslauterner student wins Best Poster Award for innovative research!

Birkenfeld, Deutschland - The student Lara Hector, who studied at the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences in the Applied Life Sciences area, was recently awarded the Best Poster Award of the German Society for Immungsetics (DGI). She received this award for her bachelor thesis, which was created in the HLA laboratory of the Stefan Morsch Foundation in Birkenfeld and deals with the improvement of the search for suitable stem cell donors for leukemia patients.

In her work, Hector developed a procedure known as the Next Generation Sequencing Assay to decrypt the HLA-DOB. HLA-DOB plays a crucial role in the expression of HLA characteristics that are relevant for the body's immune response. So that HLA characteristics between donors and recipients agree, it is necessary to ensure the success of stem cell transplants. Ten HLA characteristics are currently classified as clinically relevant. Even if certain deviations (mismatches) are tolerable, they reduce the chances of survival of the patients.

Scientific relevance of research

The importance of the HLA-DOB gene for selection of donors could have far-reaching health consequences for patients. Preliminary studies on the clinical relevance of the HLA-DOB gene have not yet been published. Lara Hector presented her research results at an international conference of the DGI, on which only six were awarded the Best Poster Award by over 150 posters submitted.

The care of Lara Hector in the HLA laboratory was carried out by Dr. Wolfgang Peter and Yannik Busch. Every year, two to three students complete their practical phase in this laboratory, which enables them to process and present scientific projects independently. Dr. Wolfgang Peter emphasizes the scientific relevance of Lara's work and emphasizes that her NGS Assay is expanding the laboratory's molecular biological portfolio and improving genotyping potential stem cell donors.

The challenges in the stem cell transplantation regarding HLA characteristics are not new. According to an examination, all 14,000 HLA alleleles are increasingly recorded, which makes the search for suitable donors complicated. In many cases, alternative sources for stem cells, such as HLA-Matched unrelished adult, must be considered. Since 2007, transplants from non -related donors have exceeded the uniform siblings, which indicates the increasing difficulties of finding a suitable donor. These current aspects illustrate the importance of Hector’s research in a broader context, such as pmc.nlm.nih.gov.

-transmitted by West-East media