Life Sciences Bridge Award Award for Tuberculosis Research Using Cutting-Edge Bioengineering Technologies
4 November 2024
Dr Vivek Thacker from the Medical Faculty Heidelberg receives the Life Sciences Bridge Award
Dr Vivek Thacker has received the Life Sciences Bridge Award from the Aventis Foundation for his tuberculosis research using state-of-the-art bioengineering technologies. The biophysicist is researching how the tuberculosis bacterium can defy both the immune system and antibiotic treatment. Dr Thacker is a scientist at the Medical Faculty Heidelberg of Heidelberg University and heads a research group at the Center for Infectious Diseases of the Heidelberg University Hospital. Endowed with 100,000 euros – making it one of Germany’s most highly endowed prizes for young life science researchers – the award is intended to support further research work and pave the way to a professorship.
The Thacker laboratory conducts research at the interface of infectious diseases, immunology, bioengineering and the systems biology of multicellular systems. The team develops and uses, among other things, artificially produced human organ-on-a-chip models – organs in a miniature format. This includes the lung-on-a-chip system, which is equipped with a porous and stretchable membrane. It can be used to simulate what happens at the interface between the alveoli and the capillaries – the smallest vessels – surrounding them. Dr Thacker has succeeded in making this biochip, developed at Harvard University in the United States, usable for tuberculosis research. Work in this field thus far has too rarely had access to such state-of-the-art technologies, as the Heidelberg scientist points out.
The lung-on-a-chip system enabled him to spatially and temporally reproduce the interaction of tuberculosis bacteria with their host cells during breathing, meaning he could directly observe the very first moments of a tuberculosis infection. With the long strands they form, the bacteria bind the cell nucleus of infected phagocytes of the immune system and suppress their immune response. This means that the pathogens remain hidden in the body and evade the immune system and antibiotics. Dr Thacker has also managed to confirm the special protective function of surfactant, a substance vital for functioning breathing. The amount of surfactant produced in specialized cells in the lungs is crucial for how well the initial growth of tuberculosis bacteria can be controlled.
The Aventis Foundation is honoring Dr Thacker’s interdisciplinary development of the technology, which he uses to trace the origin of tuberculosis. “His research can lead to new therapeutic approaches to this terrible disease,” says Prof. Dr Werner Müller-Esterl, chairman of the Life Sciences Bridge Award jury. The Aventis Foundation is an independent, non-profit foundation based in Frankfurt am Main that promotes art and culture as well as science, research and teaching. The Life Sciences Bridge Award is given to up to three winners every year and serves to support research talent at German universities. It is intended to help strengthen world-class research in Germany.
At the University of Cambridge in the UK, Vivek Thacker specialized in physics in the Natural Sciences Tripos course, which he then studied in more depth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Back in the UK, the scientist earned his doctorate in biophysics at Cambridge and then joined a tuberculosis research group at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne (Switzerland). Since October 2023, Dr Thacker has headed his own research group in the Medical Microbiology and Hygiene section at the Center for Infectious Diseases of the Heidelberg University Hospital.