Doris Kaltenecker

Amazed to share our new study published in @CellCellPress revealing how the liver contributes to weight loss in cancer via disruption of a circadian regulator and secretion of catabolic factors. Big thanks to @FiskerSchmidt, S. Herzig, @BerrielDiaz 🧵👇 cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

New @ScienceMagazine Discovery of a circuit that connects stress and skin inflammation science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Our live tissue clearing paper is out in @naturemethods! We achieved optical clearing of mammalian brain tissues without compromising normal neuronal function. Big congrats to @Shigenori774 and our wonderful collaborators! 🎉 nature.com/articles/s4159… (1/10)

This is really cool (and wild): Scientists simulated a complete living cell for the first time. Every molecule, every reaction, from DNA replication to cell division. The paper (Luthey-Schulten et al., Cell 2026, doi.org/10.1016/j.cell…), just out today, used JCVI-Syn3A — a synthetic minimal bacterium with fewer than 500 genes. A 3D+time simulation of the full 105-minute cell cycle: DNA replication, protein translation, metabolism, division. Every gene, protein, RNA, and chemical reaction tracked through physical space. It took years to build. Multiple GPUs. Six days of compute time per run. And this is the simplest possible cell. A human cell has ~20,000 genes. It lives in tissue. It interacts with neighbors. It differentiates. It responds to drugs in ways that depend on context we haven't fully measured. Mechanistic simulation of the minimal cell costs 6 GPU-days for 105 minutes of biology. You cannot scale that to human cells. The complexity isn't 40x harder. It's exponentially harder. This is why the field pivoted to data-driven models. You can't hand-encode the regulatory wiring of a human hepatocyte. But you can learn it — if you have the right perturbation data collected across enough diverse biological contexts. The two approaches aren't competing. Papers like this generate the ground truth that future ML models need for validation. But the path to a clinically useful virtual cell runs through foundation models, not through scaling up mechanistic simulation. Amazing work!

Excited to share our new paper in @CellCellPress with @MarcoRuella, led by @Shan_Liu_ and @PuneethGuru_. CAR T cell therapy loses effectiveness over time due to metabolic exhaustion, but we found a surprisingly simple approach to address it. 👇 cell.com/cell/abstract/…

Targeting the skull bone marrow has huge potential to transform how we treat brain disease. Happy to share our Preview in @CellCellPress highlighting one of the most exciting and influential papers I have seen in this field. cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

Now online! Restoring circadian rhythms in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus reverses aging biomarkers and extends lifespan in male mice dlvr.it/TRJ324

Now in @CellCellPress: We profiled cerebrospinal fluid proteomes from 5,000 neurology patients by mass spectrometry — mapping protein changes across stroke, brain cancer, infections & autoimmune diseases, revealing shared and disease-specific signatures. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Thrilled to share the primary focus of my PhD thesis work, now out in @ScienceMagazine today! We developed Trikines — engineered cytokines that reconfigure receptor complex assembly to reshape signaling directly in endogenous immune cells. doi.org/10.1126/scienc…

Proud to share that @DeepPiction has been awarded a €2.5M EIC grant, one of Europe’s most competitive funding programs for startups (success rates as low as ~3%). With this, we’ve raised €7M in the last 8 months across grants and seed financing. We’ll use this to push our precision drug development platform forward to tackle major medically unmet needs, starting with Long COVID. Excited for what’s next, and always happy to connect with potential co-development partners, collaborators, and future team members. eic.ec.europa.eu/news/61-start-…

The time of day for cancer immunotherapy is associated with major outcomes. Early is better. Results from a randomized trial of lung cancer, backs up the importance of our circadian rhythm and immune system nature.com/articles/s4159…

Outstanding paper demonstrating one more role for the circulating energetic stress marker GDF15: regulating the immune system. GDF15 increases dramatically during successful pregnancy. It signals on the brain. And the brain in turn regulates the rest of the body. This new paper in mice shows that the brain regulate immune T cell function, tuning down their pro-inflammatory states by signaling on the spleen—a big reservoir of immune cells sitting in your abdomen. We know from other work that cells experiencing excessive energy resistance, when their mitochondria can’t respire properly, release GDF15 as a marker of energetic stress. doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet… This new paper is a nice example of metaboception—the brain’ sensing of the body’s metabolic/energetic state regulating immunity. nature.com/articles/s4159…

Chronic stress drives liver cancer by impairing the hepatic kynurenine pathway and immune surveillance dlvr.it/TQRpqg

From 3D imaging to therapy Using our DISCO tissue clearing and whole organ 3D imaging platform, we revealed skull to meninges microchannels connecting calvarial bone marrow with the brain borders in mice (Cai...Ertürk, Nature Neuroscience,2018, bit.ly/vdisco). We then extended this biology to humans, discovering distinct skull bone marrow programs and structural skull meninges connections in health and neurological disease (Kolabas...Ertürk, Cell, 2023). Now, a new study reports a first therapeutic application of this route: intracalvariosseous (calvarial) injection of drug loaded albumin nanoparticles to “hijack” calvarial immune cells, which then migrate via skull meninges microchannels to CNS lesions, bypassing the blood brain barrier and improving outcomes in stroke models, with encouraging clinical feasibility data (Gao et al., Cell, 2026) We are proud that DISCO enabled biology that is now turning into concrete therapeutic strategies for devastating neurological diseases. More to come. #DISCO #TissueClearing #Neuroimmunology #Stroke #Nanomedicine #DrugDelivery #BBB #CNS Refs (for linking in comments): Cai et al. Nat Neuroscience, nature.com/articles/s4159… Kolabas et al. Cell 2023, the video from Gao et al. Cell 2026 (online Jan 16, 2026). cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

I am proud to share our multi-omics study in cancer cachexia out in @NatMetabolism 🦀 Through metabolomics, transcriptomics and glucose tracing of multiple cachexia target tissues, we uncovered a metabolic pathway with pro-cachectic potential.

This is a powerful multi-tissue, multi-omics view showing that activation of one-carbon metabolism is a conserved hallmark of cancer cachexia. Grateful to have contributed alongside such an outstanding team! 😀

We’re hiring – Computer Science PhD at iBIO (Helmholtz Munich / LMU). Project: build AI-driven, whole-body multi-omics atlases by combining scRNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, proteomics and 3D imaging. Looking for someone with real omics data analysis experience using ML/DL. You’ll work on one of the richest biological datasets in the world with an outstanding team of computer and wet-lab scientists. Great opportunity – apply or share! linkedin.com/jobs/view/4353…

A tour-de-force circadian proteomics study shows daily rhythms in ~19,000 proteins across 32 tissues in mice, revealing the pervasive reach of the circadian clock. #CircadianBiology #Proteomics #SystemsBiology @MolecularCell cell.com/molecular-cell…

Today in @NatureMedicine we report that AI can predict 130 diseases from 1 night of sleep🛌 We trained a foundation model (#SleepFM) on 585K hours of sleep recordings from 65K people—brain, heart, muscle & breathing signals combined. AI learns the language of sleep🧵

One of our top-rated posts on @altmetric in 2025 was published in @NatureBiotech. You can read 'Nanocarrier imaging at single-cell resolution across entire mouse bodies with deep learning' open access here: spklr.io/6011BQufx

Thrilled to share our latest work--combining CATCH with whole-body HYBRiD imaging, leveraging click chemistry to visualize and identify drug-targeted cells. Led by a brilliant team @ZhengyuanP and @VerinaLeung