12/04/2024

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Ashish Goyal, Jens Bauer, Joschka Hey: Waltraud Lewenz Prize

This year's winners of the Waltraud Lewenz Prize are a team of young scientists: Senior Postdoc Dr. Ashish Goyal (Heidelberg) together with his co-first authors PhD student Jens Bauer (Tübingen) and former PhD student/postdoc Dr. Joschka Hey (Heidelberg) come from the field of epigenetics and they are awarded for their work "DNMT and HDAC inhibition induces immunogenic neoantigens from human endogenous retroviral element-derived transcripts".

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The awardees Jens Bauer, Joschka Hey and Ashish Goyal (f. l.). © Dr. Anja Mehl-Lautscham/DKFZ

In this paper, this research team describes the identification of neoantigens encoded by newly activated transcripts upon epigenetic therapies.
The study was led by the young research team in a collaboration between the groups in Tübingen within the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK) of Prof Hans-George Rammensee and Prof Juliane Walz, Translational Immunology, Tübingen, and the group of Prof Christoph Plass, Department of Cancer Epigenomics at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ).
The work was published in Nature Communications in 2023.

The Waltraud Lewenz prize is endowed with 7.500 EUR. Mrs. Waltraud Lewenz was a High school teacher for chemistry and mathematics.  She died in 1999 at the age of 58 years of a cancerous disease. The idea to donate the inheritance to the DKFZ came from a teacher friend, Mrs. Ursula Löhr, who knew the DKFZ through numerous visits on pupils' days. Mrs. Lewenz wanted to use her inheritance in particular to support the work of young scientists in the field of "Cancer Risk Factors and Prevention" or "Diagnostics and Experimental Therapy".

Link to the original report (DKFZ Intranet)

Link to the original publication