ISAR Bioscience

ISAR Bioscience is a young trans­la­tio­nal rese­arch insti­tute and idea incu­ba­tor in Plan­egg near Munich, owned by the non-pro­fit StemCell­Reg­Med. Our com­pany is sup­ported by a core grant from the Free State of Bava­ria, and our rese­arch focu­ses on auto­im­mune dise­a­ses, dege­ne­ra­tive dise­a­ses of the brain like Alzheimer’s, and heart dise­a­ses. We use human indu­ced plu­ri­po­tent stem cell (iPSC) tech­no­lo­gies to deve­lop dise­ase models for the dis­co­very of novel drugs and cell the­ra­pies. Within this frame­work, the Signal­ling Plat­form was foun­ded two years ago to deve­lop fit-for-pur­pose tools and approa­ches to sup­port the next gene­ra­tion of GPCR drug discovery.

Prof. Martin Lohse is Pro­fes­sor of Phar­ma­co­logy at the Uni­ver­sity of Würz­burg since 1993 and Chair­man of ISAR Bioscience since 2020. His con­tri­bu­ti­ons to the GPCR rese­arch field and com­mu­nity are many and signi­fi­cant, espe­ci­ally in the fields of car­dio­logy, GPCR phar­ma­co­logy, and novel bio­sen­sor deve­lo­p­ment to study cel­lu­lar signal­ling and recep­tor dyna­mics. In 2021 Dr. Mar­tha Som­mer (front right in pic­ture below) joi­ned ISAR Bioscience, having pre­viously led her own rese­arch group in bio­phy­sics for many years at the Cha­rité in Ber­lin. Bes­i­des having a keen inte­rest in the bio-mole­cu­lar dyna­mics under­ly­ing GPCR signal trans­duc­tion, Mar­tha works to pro­mote net­wor­king and col­la­bo­ra­tion within the inter­na­tio­nal GPCR rese­arch community.

The Signal­ling Plat­form Team is addi­tio­nally com­pri­sed of post-doc­to­ral rese­ar­chers Dr. Tobias Ben­kel (far right) and Dr. Alexei Sirbu (back centre), as well as young sci­en­tists Anne Refs­holt (far left) and Ila­ria Mar­cari (front left). Tog­e­ther, this team is pushing the fron­tiers of GPCR rese­arch by deve­lo­ping radi­cally new tech­no­lo­gies like UniSens.