Congrats to Markus Staudt, Peter Meinig, Riley Deutsch-Williams and our colleagues from the Mikula and Herth labs in Vienna and Copenhagen on acceptance of the click-cascade-assembly paper at Angewandte Chemie — should be online in the next few weeks! Some cool imaging experiments came together for the final version, courtesy of Reviewer #2, and thanks to Riley and RW pulling a mouse out of their proverbial hats.
The $3 million MGH Rappaport Grand Challenge on A Systems Level View of Human Disease was awarded to our project on understanding and preventing in hospital cardiac arrest with real-time beside AI. Our efforts will build on longstanding clinical-kinetics collaboration with CSB colleagues John Higgins and Aaron Aguirre. Thanks to the Rappaport Foundation and congratulations to the rest of the team, which spans CSB, the Wellman Center, the Heart & Vascular Institute, and the Neuroscience Institute.
Congrats to Markus Staudt on his poster being featured in the Sci-Mix Session for top abstracts at this year’s ACS fall meeting in Chicago. Lots of academic and industrial interest in our new techniques for cascade assembly—the paper should be coming out soon.
Welcome to Gerard Lorio, joining the lab later this month to work as a post-baccalaureate technician focused on systems engineering for our multiple ongoing imaging projects. Gerard comes to us after a distinguished undergraduate career at LSU — wish him luck surviving the winter!
Bravo to Peter Meinig on publication of his journal club paper in Nature Reviews Chemistry: “Tumour microenvironment in the surgical spotlight”. Peter collaborated with Dang Nguyen (who was a Fall 2025 student in Jonathan’s HBTM235 course at the medical school) to recap recent CSB work to develop spray-on probes for real-time detection of tumor boundaries in the operative context. Congrats to Peter and Dang.
Welcome and congratulations to Andreas Löffler, awarded a Marshall Plan scholarship to spend the next 5 months here at CSB. Andi will be working with Markus, Walter and Peter on a broad array of collaborative projects, from blood thinners and bioTIMERS, to iSAFE, to the flux capacitor.
Welcome and congratulations to Barbara Herrmann, who will be here at CSB for the next 6 months on a Marshall Plan scholar award. She will work on bioTRANSLATE and other transatlantic agendas our team has underway.
Walter Kuba, PhD has been awarded a prestigious Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship from the Austrian Science foundation (FWF) for a two year postdoc in the Carlson Lab, with additional funding for a return phase to Vienna thereafter. The Schrödinger program is the FWF’s premier award supporting the international training of exceptional young scientists who will be key future contributors to science in Austria.
Walter’s project in Boston will expand on key pilot experiments he performed during his visit to CSB in 2021-2022, aimed at tackling the perennial clinical challenge of simultaneous clotting and bleeding. Walter has proposed new bioorthogonal circuits that can provide precision control of hematologic therapeutics. Congratulations to Walter!NIH-NIGMS has awarded a Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award (R35 MIRA) award to Jonathan Carlson, MD, PhD, providing 5 years of flexible funding to develop innovative bioorthogonal temporospatial tools: new methods to understand where and when biological events occur in living systems.
The Lundbeck Foundation has funded a 3 year postdoctoral project for Markus Staudt, PhD, which will include 1 year in the Mikula Lab in Vienna at TUWien and 1 year in the Carlson Lab at CSB, exploring new bioorthogonal chemistry to enable radiotracer detection across the blood brain barrier. After his stay at TUWien, Markus’ award will bring him to Boston and CSB to begin his postdoctoral work in late 2024, and be followed by a return to Denmark to wrap up the project in the laboratories of co-sponsor Matthias Herth. Bravo to Markus on a successful proposal and the fellowship award.
Martin Wilkovitsch, PhD, won the AWS Best of Biotech Award for best early track biotech/pharma company for his start-up Velaex Technologies, which aims to exploit in vivo chemical reactions to precisely deliver and activate drugs only at the site of disease. Bravo to Wilko and his cofounder Sebastian Hecko.
Martin Wilkovitsch, PhD has won the ARIT2022 Poster Session Award, from the Office of Science and Technology Austria and the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation, for his poster describing his work on SAFE (Nature Biotechnology). Martin’s poster on ‘Bioorthogonal Turn-off’ described his synthesis of these tools for exceptionallly rapid, comprehensive, and gentle cleavage of bioorthogonal linkers in live cells, organs, tissues, and even living mice. This first-ever method for visualizing living cells and tissues in many colors (Research Briefing) was developed in collaboration with his advisor Hannes Mikula (TUWien) and the Carlson and Weissleder team at CSB. Congrats to Martin!
The Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) has funded bioTRANSLATE, a joint collaboration between the Carlson Lab, Hannes Mikula, PhD, of TUWien, and Marion Goldeck, PhD, of the Medical University of Vienna (MUWien). This three year project will build new technologies for bioorthogonal translation of chemical into biological information.