Neurologist Dr. Varun Venkataramani (36) from Heidelberg University Hospital will be awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Early Career Award 2026, the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation announced today. The prizewinner has fundamentally expanded our understanding of glioblastomas – particularly malignant brain tumors. They arise from glial cells, whose task is to protect and nourish nerve cells. Venkataramani discovered that glioblastomas hijack the nervous system to tap into electrical signals, which they then use to accelerate their deadly growth. A drug to interrupt this electrical activity is already being tested on patients.

As an emerging branch of clinical medicine, microbiota medicine has attracted worldwide attention from clinicians, medical educators, patient communities, and industry. However, this developing field still lacks consensus on its fundamental principles as well as guidelines for clinical and educational practice. An expert panel was convened by the journal Microbiota Medicine Research at the 2025 CHINAGUT Conference to develop the principles and practice guidelines of microbiota medicine.

A research team at the LKS Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong (HKUMed), has developed a novel live-attenuated vaccine candidate, cb1, capable of generating broad immunity against a wide range of beta-coronaviruses with a single intranasal dose. The vaccine not only prevents severe disease, but also effectively blocks viral transmission in animal models, offering a promising strategy for pandemic preparedness against future coronavirus threats. The groundbreaking study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

A research team led by Professor Xiang David Li from the Department of Chemistry at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with researchers from the Shenzhen Bay Laboratory and Tsinghua University, has made a breakthrough in epigenetic drug discovery. The team has successfully developed a first-in-class chemical inhibitor that precisely and selectively targets the ATAC complex, a critical cellular “switch operator” that activates tumour-promoting genes, opening a novel therapeutic avenue for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The findings were recently published in the top-tier journal Nature Chemical Biology, and multiple international patent applications have been filed.

A study into the long-term health impacts of coronavirus, led by experts from the University of Leicester, Imperial College London and University College London, has found changes in the blood after COVID-19 that might pinpoint patients at risk of ongoing lung disease

Scientists have developed a model which can identify small mammals from their footprints. These animals are often crucially important to an ecosystem but hard to monitor, and many species which play very different roles in an ecosystem are very hard to tell apart without DNA analysis, which is expensive, invasive, and stressful for the animal. Now, by collecting images of footprints from two near-identical species of sengi — formerly called elephant shrews because of their long noses — and training a model to tell the difference between them, scientists have found a cheaper, simpler way of keeping an eye on these tiny mammals.  

Building on over a decade of research into the bioactive components of Chansu, the team led by Professors Ma Hongyue and Duan Jin'ao from Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine collaborated with Professor Xu Huaqiang's team at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The research team selected key components from natural toad venoms with distinct medicinal properties (spirit-awakening, hallucinogenic, and detoxifying)—namely 5-OH-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and 5-OH-TMT—to systematically analyze their structure-target-efficacy-toxicity-property relationships. At atomic resolution, this study revealed the molecular mechanisms by which toad tryptamines selectively activate various serotonin receptor (5-HTR) subtypes under different medicinal property labels.