News

LOCOTACT organizes “DGE Sektionstagung Schilddrüse”
Prior to this year's annual meeting of the DGE, the SFB/TR 296 LOCOTACT hosted the Thyroid Section Conference at the Congress Center in Baden-Baden. In an interdisciplinary exchange, six LOCOTACT researchers presented and discussed the latest research findings on the following topics:
Resmetirom in fatty liver and liver cirrhosis: therapeutic thyroid hormone effect
Lars Möller (Essen)
Overcoming barriers - how thyroid hormone reaches the brain
Heike Heuer (Essen)
Thyroid hormone action in human cortical brain organoids
Robert Opitz (Berlin)
Regulation of local deiodination of thyroid hormones
Lutz Schomburg (Berlin)
Interaction of tanycytes with hormones of the HPT axis
Akila Chandrasekar (Lübeck)
IFN-I signature promotes dedifferentiation and immune evasion in thyroid cancer - New therapeutic approaches?
Tim Brandenburg (Essen)

DGE von Basedow Award 2025
Congratulations to Christoph Hoppe, PhD student in the LOCOTACT project P18 (PI Lars Möller), for receiving the highest award for experimental thyroid research in Germany. At this year's annual meeting of the DGE, Christoph was honored for his work “Extrahepatic effects of thyroid hormone and resmetirom override their beneficial hepatic effects in alcohol-associated liver disease”.
Well done - Congratulations for this great achievement!

Poster Prize at GASL Annual Meeting 2025
Last week LOCOTACT PostDoc Manuela Kowalczyk presented her work from P18 (PI Denise Zwanziger) at the 41st Annual Conference of the German Association for the Study of the Liver (GASL) in Munich. Her presentation was awarded with the poster prize in the category metabolism!
Congratulations Manuela, for your great performance!

LOCOTACT Lectures – Sabine Costagliola
In December 2024 we had the honor to welcome Professor Sabine Costagliola, the director of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Biologie humaine et moléculaire (IRIBHM) at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium as speaker in our LOCOTACT Lecture. In her talk "Revolutionizing Thyroid Research Through Organoids: Current Advances and Future Prospectives", Professor Costagliola provided fascinating new insights into her current work on understanding thyroid organogenesis using human pluripotent stem cell-derived thyroid gland and lung organoids, thyroid organoid -based modeling of TSH resistance as well as on very interesting advancements in understanding Thyroid tissue carcinogenesis.
We would like to thank Professor Costagliola for the great talk and the inspiring scientific discussion.

LOCOTACT Lectures - Gustavo Ramos
For the Locotact Lecture in November 2024 we welcomed the Immunocardiologist Gustavo Ramos from Würzburg. The Professor at the Immunocardiology Lab at the Comprehensive Heart Failure Center of the University Hospital Würzburg talked about “Immunological phenomena at the heart of myocardial repair”, where he gave insights about his research of immunological responses in the heart in the context of myocardial infarction and under ageing.
We would like to thank the speaker for taking part in this lecture series, giving an intriguing talk and the fruitful discussion.

Timo Müller as Speaker in the Series on “Gender Aspects in Biomedical Research and Clinical Medicine”
On 12.11.2024, LOCOTACT PI Timo D. Müller has been invited to give a presentation within the Series on “Gender Aspects in Biomedical Research and Clinical Medicine” at University Hospital Essen Campus. His talk was entitled “Regulation des Energie- und Glukosestoffwechsel durch Inkretin-basierte Ko- und Tri-Agonisten - welche Rolle spielt das Geschlecht?” and Timo higlighted once again the potential of these agonists and how important gender aspects are in medical research and therapy.
Thank you for sharing your fascinating results and ideas with the auditorium!

LOCOTACT Lectures – Randy F. Stout
We were honored to have Randy Stout from New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine as our guest at the online October 2024 LOCOTACT Lecture. He presented “New methods and imaging tools to test for a reciprocal relationship between thyroid hormone distribution and gap junction connectivity in the brain”. Creating novel in vitro and in vivo T3 reporter models he investigates the role gap junctions as an alternative way of TH transport within the brain particularly in astrocytes.
We would like to thank the speaker for accepting our invitation, for giving an inspiring talk and for the lively discussion.

PhD thesis defense
Congratulations to Nuria López Alcánatara for successfully defending her PhD thesis within the project "P14 - Control of cellular TH metabolism in human and mouse NASH" under the supervision of Prof. Jens Mittag on October 10, 2024.

LOCOTACT at 1st Conference on Exerimental Endocrinology in Dresden
The 1st Conference on Experimental Endocrinology organized by the DGE working group Experimental Endocrinology took place in Dresden on October 13-14, 2024.
We are proud that researchers from LOCOTACT projects have been invited to give presentations and share newest research data. Riccardo Dore (P12) talked in the session Single cells omics - what is new about "Thyroid hormoe receptor(s) in the regulation of cardiac functions" and Eva K. Wirth (P15) was invited to the Podium discussion: Hormones measurements - Routine vs. Research with the topic "Thyroid hormones".