MSCoreSys status meeting 2022

The members of the MSCoreSys research initiative met on the 26th and 27th of September 2022 in Heidelberg to hold their annual status meeting. With more than 100 scientists on site, the four research cores from Berlin, Mainz, Munich and Heidelberg presented and discussed the progress of their individual projects, exchanged on the progress of the common aim of establishing a mass spectrometry based diagnostic pipeline in systems medicine and kicked off substantial networks working towards the consolidation of the MSCoreSys research initiative.

In addition the scientists engaged in discussion panels dealing with strategies to improve the inter-core collaboration, both as a training opportunity for individual scientists and to exchange best practices with regard to the biggest challenges in data management, clinical translation, and mass spectrometry technologies. In this regard, it was great to see the result of the ring trial that was conducted, demonstrating the robustness of the mass spectrometry-based approaches that have now been established across the labs in MSCoreSys.

In the last 1.5 years the cores successfully recruited junior research groups, whose heads met for the first time in person and used the opportunity to discuss essential topics, such as personnel recruitment, internal and external networking, as well as the establishment and further development on the academic career track.

Representatives were elected from the postdocs at each research core, to organise retreats and lab-exchanges, and a lecture series with visiting scientists from related fields. Furthermore, the PhD students and postdocs engaged in lively discussions by presenting their projects in the poster session. With a collaborative network in place, future efforts will focus on strengenthing the ties with other parties in the systems medicine landscape in Germany. "It is very nice to see how strong the interest of the members of MSCoreSys is in a mutual exchange. I was able to make many new contacts with very interesting discussion partners here," says Junyan Lu, head of the junior research group "Computational Mass-spectrometry, Multi-omics and precision oncology" in SMART-CARE. "This will help to advance my projects, initiate new collaborations and thus also serve the overall progress of MSCoreSys."