Inspiration Stage: Inside Disease 

Our bodies are constantly working to protect, repair, and regulate themselves. But during disease this delicate balance can be disrupted in unexpected ways. Disease may arrive from outside, like a bacterial invader. Or it can emerge from within, when our own cells change behaviour and start to cause us harm.  

New science looks at disease holistically, tracking how disease affects the body as a whole. From rogue cells and drug-resistant bacteria to inflammation and systemic disease, these talks explore how illness takes hold, and what we can learn by looking beyond individual cells and organs to the body as a whole. 

TALKS INCLUDE:

12:00 - 12:15 | Elisa Moutin,  Berlin Institute of Health

Can your cells change identity and should they?

Have you ever had to become someone else to fit in? It turns out, the cells making up your organs do all the time! This talk will explore the reasons for such transformations and health consequences.

Chronic inflammatory diseases such as chronic liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are responsible for up to 25% of all recorded cancers cases. When an organ is chronically inflamed, cells making up the affected organ are able to switch identity and become a different cell type. This allows the cells to survive the inflamed environment and regenerate the damaged organ. In this talk, I will first explain what are the processes that allow this switch of identity, before presenting new data suggesting that cell identity switching could be at the origin of all types of liver cancer.

12:15 - 12:30 | Julien Thebing,  Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing at Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und Prüfung (BAM)

Pump it out: How do bacteria outsmart our antibiotics?

Antibiotics transformed medicine, making once-fatal infections treatable. But bacteria never stop evolving. Discover how they outsmart antibiotics, one of medicine's greatest ongoing challenges.

Right now, millions of bacteria are growing, dividing, and evolving in your surroundings, on your skin and even inside your body. In fact, the human body contains roughly as many bacterial cells as human cells. As bacteria multiply, random changes occur in their DNA, and some of these mutations make them resistant to antibiotics. One particularly fascinating strategy is their ability to produce tiny molecular pumps that actively remove antibiotics from within bacterial cells before they can do any harm. These pumps are at the centre of my own research. I study how bacteria evolve to become better at pumping out antibiotics and how this can lead to the spread of antimicrobial resistance. The discovery of antibiotics truly transformed medicine making countless surgeries possible and once-fatal infections treatable. While bacteria are constantly evolving at a dramatic pace, developing new antibiotics is slow, expensive and increasingly difficult. Can research keep up in this evolutionary arms race? This talk is for anyone who wants to understand how their next antibiotic treatment will work or why it could be ineffective.

12:30 - 12:45  | Doris Kaltenecker, Institute for Diabetes and Cancer, Helmholtz Munich

Seeing systemic disease in 3D

What if we could make an entire organism transparent and watch disease unfold across the whole body? 

Diseases such as obesity affect the entire body, yet we often study them by examining tiny pieces of tissue under a microscope. While this approach has led to countless discoveries, it can also make us miss the bigger picture: how organs communicate and how changes in one part of the body influence many others. What if we could step back and observe the body as a whole? Recent advances in tissue clearing, 3D imaging and artificial intelligence are making this possible. In mouse models, scientists can render organs, and even entire organisms, transparent and create detailed three-dimensional maps of biological structures. AI then helps analyze these enormous datasets and identify patterns that would otherwise remain hidden. In this talk, I will take the audience inside these remarkable images and show how they are changing the way we investigate health and disease. Rather than viewing organs in isolation, we can begin to understand the body as an interconnected system and uncover relationships that remain invisible when we examine only one small piece at a time.

12:45 - 13:00 | Sreepradha Eswaran,  Uniklinik RWTH Aachen University

How does food set inflammation in motion?

Your immune system responds not only to infections, but also to what you eat. Discover how diets high in processed sugars, fat, and cholesterol can keep inflammatory signals switched on.

Every meal becomes part of an ongoing conversation within the body. Immune cells detect signals, move between tissues, and help determine whether inflammation protects, supports repair, or contributes to disease. In this talk, I draw on eight years of research to explain how diets high in fructose, fat, and cholesterol can disturb this balance. My work examines how the intestinal immune system may act as a gateway through which dietary signals contribute to persistent inflammation and conditions such as steatotic and alcohol-associated liver disease. Using examples from preclinical models and patient-derived samples, I will explain how dietary components can set off a cascade of inflammatory signals and how molecular signals guide immune cells through the body. The talk is intended for anyone interested in what happens after food leaves the plate and how everyday dietary patterns may influence long-term health.

13:00 - 13:20 | Meet the Scientists

Meet the Scientists-session

Stay around for an informal networking session: ask your own questions, start a conversation, and connect directly with the speakers.