Clinical Anatomy and Cell Biology

Our research group works on projects in clinical anatomy, biomedical science education and cell biology, focusing on immunology, breastmilk stem cells and cancer.

Main lines of research

• Clinical Anatomy

  Various research projects in clinical anatomy are under way in collaboration with orthopaedic surgeons at the Cantonal Hospital of Fribourg (Philippe Vial, Gianluca Maestretti-Kretz) and the Cantonal Hospital of St Gallen (Karl Grob), with rehabilitation neurologist at the Cantonal Hospital of Jura (Serdar Koçer) and with the Department of Anatomy, Ankara University, Turkey (Aysun Uz).

• Medical and Biomedical Science Education

  Focussing on Science Literacy and on Teaching of Anatomy, various projects are underway in collaboration with Elisabeth Eppler (University of Basel).

• Immunology

  Research in immunology comprises a variety of projects:

  1. The role of human microglia in Japanese encephalitis virus infection infection in collaboration with Nils Lannes (University of Fribourg) and Artur Summerfield (University of Bern).  
  2. The presence of immune cells and their function in human breastmilk.
  3. The cytotoxic functions of immune cells towards different microbes, in collaboration with Michael Walch and Pierre-Yves Mantel (University of Fribourg).
• Breastmilk Stem Cells Research

  Stem cell research takes the advantage of the newly discovered multipotentl stem cells in human breastmilk. New differentiation protocols for the generation of insulin producing cells, similar to pancreatic beta cells, are developed.

• Cancer

  Focussing on prostate cancer, the influence of metal-based drugs on cancer stem cell differentiation is investigated.