Question: How did you came across with this idea?

Eva Rath answered on 20 Jun 2023: last edited 20 Jun 2023 9:11 am

My research aims to better understand intestinal inflammation. What is the reason why some people suffer from inflammatory bowel diseases? What happens on a cellular level? Can we do something to prevent or cure inflammation in the intestine? To answer these questions, I also worked with intestinal organoids, because they are a great model to study how the intestine can regenerate after an injury like inflammation. In 2013 I met my friend Tamara by chance. We were both working in the same building. At that time she studied nutrient transport, drug absorption, and hormone production in the intestine, mostly in cultured cells. As mentioned in the article, these cells lines had some drawbacks: Cell lines need to grow and divide constantly so that they will stay alive long enough for the experiment. Therefore, most cell lines originate from tumors or have had their DNA altered. But the changes that make these cells grow so well also change other properties. In particular tumor cell lines, that are very often used to investigate intestinal nutrient transport, sometimes have more transporters than normal cells, or fewer, or they can even lack certain transporters. When we first met and startet to chat, we came up with the idea to combine “my” organoids and “her” methods to study nutrient transport. It worked amazingly well!
Bottom line: talk to people, stay curious, the best ideas come around in teams 🙂