Projects

Dr. Guido Dallmann

Current Projects

SysKid, a large-scale integrating European research project, aims at understanding chronic kidney disease in the context of diabetes and hypertension.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects up to 10% of the population. Besides eventual progression towards end stage renal disease CKD impacts the patient’s quality of life by causing serious comorbidities including cardiovascular complications and bone metabolism disorders. On the everyday clinical level early stage diagnosis and tailored treatment of CKD are still inadequate. In addition, CKD seems not to have reached its appropriate emplacement in an epidemiological and healthcare perspective yet, and the pathophysiology of the disease on a molecular and cellular level is not well enough understood. Our sysKID consortium was installed for precisely addressing these issues: To unravel the molecular and cellular mechanisms of chronic kidney disease development, combine this information with clinical risk factors, and on this basis delineate chronic kidney disease biomarkers. These markers will allow us to perform preclinical studies of novel therapy approaches for halting disease progression, and will provide us with the materials for development and clinical evaluation of tools for early stage diagnosis as well as prognosis and treatment monitoring.

METAFLUX is built on the hypothesis that cancer causes significant and mechanistically important changes to metabolic flux and that these can be used as diagnostic tools, to understand cellular pathways and their response to drug intervention, in vitro and in vivo The project focuses on the training of young researchers, to enable them to go on to successful research careers.

Although metabolomics has only recently emerged, dynamic profiles generated in Metabolic Flux Analysis (MFA) are becoming increasingly important to analyse biological networks in a quantitative manner and as part of systems biology approaches. MFA allows us to probe hypotheses by incorporating a priori biological knowledge to provide practical descriptions of observed cell behaviours, and to characterise the outcome of network perturbations. Flux analysis is of particular value for the diagnosis, differentiation and elucidation of mechanisms in cancer. This was recognised as early as 1924 by the Nobel Prize winner Otto Warburg who attributed cancer to a change in cellular energy production. This theme has experienced a revival in recent years through research, which has established mitochondrial dysfunction as a major mechanism in cancer.

Duration: 2010-11-01 to 2014-10-31

Finished Projects

GATiB (Genome Austria Tissue Bank)

Biobanks containing human biological samples, such as tissues, blood or body fluids as well as related data are essential resources for the establishment of the function and medical relevance of human genes. Biobanks containing both high quality normal and diseased human tissues are particularly valuable since they contain information on the genetic and epigenetic alterations as well as on modification of gene products that caused a disease and influenced its outcome.
Key components of GATiB will comprise

archival tissue samples associated with long-term follow up and medical data,
prospectively collected tissue and blood samples associated with standardized information on the patient's disease and environmental exposure,
animal models molecularly validated for their human disease relevance,
IT-tools supporting sample tracking, data storage, data mining and protecting sample donor privacy.

Duration: 01.10.2009-30.09.2012