From 15 to 17 January 2020, the Christian Doppler Laboratory Closing Symposium “From Understanding Chromatin Dynamics to Therapeutics Targeting” will take place at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (Austria). The event is jointly organized by CeMM PI Stefan Kubicek, CeMM PostDoc Sandra Schick, and Senior Principle Scientist Simon Wöhrle (Boehringer Ingelheim). The highlight of the programme is the keynote lecture by Brian R. Cairns, Chair of the Oncological Sciences Department at the University of Utah School of Medicine, and an investigator with the Huntsman Cancer Institute (USA). The line-up of speakers also includes EMBO Members Tom Owen-Hughes (University of Dundee, UK) and Dirk Schübeler (FMI for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland), among other excellent speakers from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The symposium is organized on the occasion of the ending of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Chemical Epigenetics and Antiinfectives, a close collaboration between Stefan Kubicek's Group at CeMM, Boehringer Ingelheim and Haplogen, to celebrate its successful outcome. The Christian Doppler Research Association promotes the cooperation between science and business. Under the direction of highly qualified scientists, research groups work in close contact with the commercial partners on innovative responses to business-related research questions.

For the past seven years, Stefan Kubicek’s Group has collaborated with industry on application-oriented basic research, which has resulted in 17 high-impact publications including the CD Lab as an affiliation, nine of them with Stefan Kubicek as a corresponding author. The key highlight was the study published last year in Nature Genetics with Sandra Schick as first author (“Systematic characterization of BAF mutations explains intra-complex synthetic lethalities in human cancers”. DOI: 10.1038/s41588-019-0477-9).

The CD Laboratory programme has funded a compact research group of 13 scientists over the past seven years, who have worked at CeMM, and are all still active in research. Some of them have moved to independent academic positions and others have also taken on leadership roles in industry. The CD Laboratory funding programme has supported the research of Stefan Kubicek’s Lab, resulting in an ERC Consolidator Grant “CHROMABOLISM” awarded in 2018, and has also laid the foundation for future research. We thank the Christian Doppler Research Association, Boehringer Ingelheim and Haplogen for this successful collaboration.