Steffen Böttcher and Silvia Brem Honored for Outstanding Medical Research

The focus of Steffen Böttcher’s current research is on the molecular mechanisms of cancer formation – in particular tumors with what are known as TP53 mutations. TP53 is a tumor suppressor gene. Normally, tumor suppressor genes restrict uncontrolled cellular growth. However, when mutations occur in these genes, this leads to increased cell division and thus to carcinogenesis or the formation of a cancer. This is the case with the TP53 gene, which is the most commonly mutated gene in human cancer. Some 50 percent of all tumors carry TP53 mutations.

In his award-winning research, Steffen Böttcher analyzes the unusual mutational spectrum of TP53 missense mutations. Until now, this anomaly was explained by the fact that missense mutations conferred additional tumor-promoting functions to the mutated TP53 gene. Using genome editing in cell lines, tests on animal models, and analyses of patients with acute myeloid leukemia, Steffen Böttcher has now successfully disproved this common hypothesis and instead identified a dominant-negative effect that drives selection of TP53 missense mutations. This will give rise to new therapeutic approaches in future. 

Neuroscientist Silvia Brem impressed the jury with her important clinical and basic research studies. Her work delivers key insights into the causes of dyslexia and contributes to the early detection of reading and spelling disorders. 

Silvia Brem has been assistant professor since 2017 and leads a research group at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich. For many years she has been studying how children’s brains develop when they learn to read. In her longitudinal studies she monitors children with impaired reading skills over several years. She has acquired unique expertise in the use of imaging techniques to visualize how the language processing network in the brains of pre-school children evolves as they learn to read.

In her most recent studies, Silvia Brem looks at the connection between speech sounds and letters in children with a family history of reading and spelling disorders. She has demonstrated a correlation between learning success and the neuronal representation of learned letters in the brain. The results indicate that new letters are less strongly represented in the brains of slow learners. On the basis of these findings, Silvia Brem is developing and evaluating an app-based training program to help children, preferably at pre-school age or when they start school.