On November 22, 2024, Lars Wismar presented his project to develop and validate a PRO-CTCAE questionnaire for patients with oral anticancer therapy at this year's joint PhD student conference of clinical pharmacists from the DPhG, DGKPha and ADKA in Hamburg. His presentation was met with great interest by the attendees.

Immune cells are capable of detecting infections just like a sniffer dog, using special sensors known as Toll-like receptors, or TLRs for short. But what signals activate TLRs, and what is the relationship between the scale and nature of this activation and the substance being detected? In a recent study, researchers from the University of Bonn and the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) used an innovative method to answer these questions. The approach that they took might help to speed up the search for drugs to combat infectious diseases, cancer, diabetes or dementia. Their findings have been published in the journal “Nature Communications.”

The two-day BIGS DrugS Retreat included a workshop on "idea mining", a lecture on blood alcohol analysis, poster presentations by the doctoral students with group discussion, a guided tour of the Altenberg Cathedral and, last but not least, a lively get-together on the first evening. The retreat was held on October 16th and 17th, 2024 in the „Jugendbildungsstätte Haus Altenberg“ in the village of Odenthal.

BIGS-DrugS PhD student Carolin Keip presented her PhD project on the quality assurance of medication analyses at the Posterwalk of the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG) and took third place. Congratulations! The DPhG poster walk took place  for the first time at this year's Expopharm in Munich on October 12.

Current program - For more than 30 years the Pharmaceutical Colloquium offers excellent lectures on current topics in drug discovery and related fields.

A low-dose, long-term dose of cannabis can not only reverse ageing processes in the brain, but also has an anti-ageing effect. BIGS DrugS member PD Dr. Andras Bilkei-Gorzo together Researchers from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and a team from Hebrew University (Israel) have now been able to show this in mice. They found the key to this in the protein switch mTOR, whose signal strength has an influence on cognitive performance and metabolic processes in the entire organism. The results have now been presented in the journal “ACS Pharmacology & Translation Science”.

As is now a tradition, the PhD Award Ceremony took place as part of the BIGS DrugS Kick-Off Meeting on July 1st.

As in previous years, Bayer AG, in cooperation with the Pharma Center Bonn and the Limes Institute, awards three prizes for outstanding PhD theses in the field of pharmaceutical research in 2023.