Nano Innovation Award

Nano Innovation Award 2018—Cell Monitoring for Cancer Research & DNA Construction Kit in Maxi Format

The LMU Center for NanoScience (CeNS) and four spin-off companies, including ibidi, have joined together to reward the best innovative theses on nanotechnology with the Nano Innovation Award 2018. Two junior researchers from Munich have been honored this year.

The Nano Innovation Award 2018 was presented on July 13 at the Center for NanoScience (CeNS) of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich. Two young researchers from Munich each received an award that recognizes the promising results of their theses on application-oriented nanosciences. The Bavaria-wide prize is endowed with €9,000 and is annually awarded by a jury of experts from science and business.

As a whole, the main focus of nanosciences is still on basic research. However, in many areas, nanoscientific research is being transferred to technical applications—with great economic potential. The Nano Innovation Award focuses specifically on the groundbreaking work being done by junior researchers, which has promising application potential for technology or medicine.

Cell Monitoring for Cancer Research
An innovative and easy-to-use microscopy technique is the basis of Konstantin Ditzel’s master’s thesis, for which he was awarded a prize of €3,000. The physicist from the team of Dr. Philipp Paulitschke at the LMU Chair of Soft Matter and Biophysics used lensless microscopy technology to test the efficacy of anticancer drugs. Konstantin Ditzel has developed an experimental set-up and data evaluation process that can determine the influence of a drug on several cell vitality parameters, simultaneously, in a high-throughput, label-free manner. This set-up allows for the continuous monitoring of the behavior of cells being treated with drugs, and is a quick and reliable determination of a drug’s efficacy (e.g., in cancer or stem cell research).

DNA Construction Kit in the Maxi Format
The award for the best doctoral thesis, endowed with a €6,000 prize, went to Dr. Klaus Wagenbauer from the group of Prof. Hendrik Dietz, Experimental Biophysics at the Faculty of Physics of the Technical University of Munich. Klaus Wagenbauer has developed a new approach for the tailor-made, controlled, and self-directed assembly of large, three-dimensional objects from genetic DNA material. He used building principles from nature to realize artificial nanostructures. Thus, nanometer-sized DNA objects can be inserted into each other like Lego bricks. The shape of the building blocks themselves is stored in the sequences of a few DNA molecules, and the shape of the individual building blocks, in turn, encodes the shape and size of the final object. For the first time, Dr. Klaus Wagenbauer has succeeded in forming defined objects at the size of viruses or small cell organelles out of miniscule building blocks. This method could be the basis for new and promising types of therapy and advanced disease diagnosis.

An Institution That Boosts Careers

"The CeNS Nano Innovation Award has become an institution. Young researchers now regard it as visible proof of the quality of their work, and as an important award for their careers," says jury member Prof. Achim Wixforth from the University of Augsburg. "The number and quality of applications impressed me this year—which made the selection of the winners a difficult task." A total of twenty-six doctoral theses and twelve master’s theses were submitted from research institutions throughout Bavaria. From these, the jurors nominated five candidates for the final selection.

Both award winners are already actively involved in transferring their findings to business applications. Konstantin Ditzel will contribute his idea and expertise to a start-up company that plans to develop and sell devices for cell culture monitoring with RFLM technology. Klaus Wagenbauer is the co-founder of a start-up company from the Technical University of Munich, which offers services and materials for the construction of nano-objects using DNA building blocks.

The LMU Center for NanoScience awarded the Nano Innovation Award together with four spin-off companies from the CeNS: attocube systems, ibidi, Nanion Technologies and NanoTemper Technologies. “CeNS is a pioneering organization with excellent scientists. With our contribution to the award, we hope to motivate them to continue their outstanding work,” says Dr. Roman Zantl, President of ibidi GmbH.