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The Christian Doppler Laboratory for Chemical Epigenetics and Antiinfectives was a public-private partnership between CeMM, Boehringer Ingelheim and Haplogen with the aim of developing novel screening technologies and identifying chemical probe compounds as a basis for future drug development projects with the corporate partners.

From 2013 to 2019, the CD Laboratory programme funded a compact research group of 13 scientists who worked in two different modules:

  • First Module (chemical epigenetics): The research team developed technologies in collaboration with Oncology Research at Boehringer Ingelheim RCV GmbH & Co KG to identify and characterize small molecules and druggable proteins regulating chromatin structure and function.

  • Second module: The research team identified chemical probes for host factors of infectious diseases based on molecular targets derived by a powerful screening approach using human haploid cells implemented at Haplogen GmbH.


For the past seven years, Stefan Kubicek’s Group collaborated with industry on application-oriented basic research and capitalizing on CeMM’s comprehensive compound library and screening expertise. This successful partnership 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).

We thank the Christian Doppler Research Association, Boehringer Ingelheim and Haplogen for this fruitful collaboration.