Team Leader
Team Staff
Institute Presentation
The University Clinic Aachen (UKA) is one of the few universities in Germany that is ranked continuously among the excellent universities since the system has been implemented in 2007. Especially Life Sciences are a major focus of the university and build a strong bridge to its University Hospital. Since Professor Christian Trautwein became Head of the Department of Gastroenterology at the University Hospital, the focus of the Clinic has become Translational Hepatology. Therefore, Aachen established a new liver transplant program, which runs stable since 2010 with around 50 liver transplants per year. Within the last ten years, UKA has become one of the major hubs for liver research in Germany and has the infrastructure to significantly contribute to the present grant application as it covers laboratories in basic Hepatology, but also has the essential patient cohorts for clinical translation of new findings. Our hepatic critical care unit has a long-standing experience in the treatment of patients with ACLF.
Our team will perform single-cell sequencing in a group of 25 patients with decompensated cirrhosis from our hepatic critical care unit (WP1). These data will be used to generate models of cell proportion estimation from whole-blood transcriptomics. Additionally, UKA will assess the composition and concentrations of circulating miRNA within a total of 1.400 serum samples from CANONIC, PREDICT, and CLARA cohorts (WP1). UKA will furthermore contribute to the clinical study in WP5 as a recruitment centre.