As in the previous years, you can find the application document for the next 2011 Werner-Risau-Prize in the download section. The prize will again be awarded during the Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Zellbiologie (DGZ), which will be held from March 30 - April 2, 2011 in the city of Bonn this time. Don´t hesitate to apply, if you think you are qualified - it`s worth it! The application deadline is January 15, 2011.

A new PDF kindly provided by the editors of Zellbiologie aktuell, the official magazine of the German Society for cell biology, is now available for download, in which Boris Strilic summarized his work on lumen formation in blood vessels. The corresponding publication of this work in the prestigious journal Developmental Cell eventually earned him the Werner-Risau-Prize.
And just as a side remark: Receiving the Werner-Risau-Prize usually does not harm your career - Boris Strilic is now a group leader in the department of Prof. Stefan Offermanns at the MaxPlanck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim, Germany.

The reverberation of the novel concepts and views that Werner Risau had developed in the field of angiogenesis research, i.e. on the molecular mechanisms that direct the growth of new blood vessels in development and disease, can still be vividly heard - more than ten years after his death: In a very recent article published in The International Journal of Developmental Biology Domenico Ribatti from the University of Bari Medical School, Italy, reviewed the seminal work of Werner Risau in the study of the development of the vascular system and in particular on the formation and maintenance of the blood-brain barrier. Here is a link to the abstract. We will try to also make the PDF available in the download section. Please check back soon!

Better late than never! Finally, It is a great pleasure to introduce this years winner of the Werner-Risau-Prize for outstanding achievements in endothelial cell biology, Dr. Boris Strilic from the Heinrich-Heine University in Duesseldorf, Germany. With his seminal study (Dev Cell 17, 505-515) Boris Strilic and coworkers presented a series of elegant experiments that demonstrated a unique way how the lumen of newly formed blood vessels could be formed. This study was also featured by an extra comment in the same issue of Developmental Cell by Kevin Nelson and Greg Beitel and made it even to the cover page of this issue with one of the micrographs.

In the download section you now can find the application document for the 2010 Werner-Risau-Prize. As in the previous years, this prize will again be awarded during the Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Zellbiologie (DGZ), which will be organized from March 10-13, 2010 in Regensburg this time. Don´t hesitate to apply, if you think you are qualified - it`s worth it! There is the money of course, but you will also have a great audience for the presentation of your scientific work and lots of possibilities to meet with others in a very nice setting.

It is a great pleasure to announce this years winner of the Werner-Risau-Prize for outstanding achievements in endothelial cell biology, Dr. Tuomas Tamela from the Molecular Cancer Biology Laboratory at the University of Helsinki. With his Nature 2008 article on the role of VEGFR-3 signalling for the formation of new blood vessel during physiological as well as disease processes, he eventually came out first from a group of very strong competitors. VEGFR-3 stands for Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor Receptor-3 and represents one of the tyrosine kinase receptors that is present on the surface of developing blood vessels and lymphatic endothelium that binds certain members of the VEGF growth factor family (in mammals there are five of these VEGFs). In his study, Dr. Tammela could show that blocking VEGFR-3 signalling decreased various important aspects of angiogenesis (such as sprouting, branching, proliferation). These observations suggest that targeting VEGFR-3 could serve as an efficient means to block the formation of new blood vessels, which in turn would help in diseases that are characterized by excessive blood vessel growth such as diabetic retinopathies or the accelerated growth of solid tumours.

Please note that the next Meeting of the DGZ will be be held March 24-27, 2009. In the information leaflet available in the Download section March 25-28 was mentioned. An updated version of the prize information document is now available for downloading. Please adjust your schedules accordingly. Sorry for any inconveniences!

Due to a very generous donation of Mrs. Barbara Risau to the Werner-Risau-Prize fund, the financial contribution that is awarded together with the personal diploma has been increased to the sum of

€ 4000.

The new Werner-Riisau-Prize will be awarded for the first time during the next meeting of the Swiss and German Societies for Cell Biology on March 25, 2009 in Konstanz, Germany. The increased prize money will certainly help to promote the popularity of the Werner-Risau-Prize and further raise its visibility and significance within the scientific community and especially amongst vascular biologists.

Here are the topics of the meeting:
Carl Zeiss Lecture: Rudolf Jaenisch (Cambridge, USA)
Symposia
A: Dynamics of the cytoskeleton (Jürgen Wehland, Braunschweig)
B: Physiology of cellular growth control (Christian Frei, Zürich)
C: Vesicle trafficking (Suzanne Pfeffer, Stanford, CA)
D: Cellular microbiology (Pascal Cossart, Paris)
E: Regulation of cellular processes by microRNAs (Ueli Schibler, Genf)
F: Systems biology of phosphatidyl-inositol-phosphate signaling (Tobias Meyer, Stanford, CA)

Minisymposia
1: Ubiquitination and the proteasome (Marcus Groettrup, Konstanz & Ivan Dikic, Frankfurt)
2: Nuclear architecture (Francois Karch, Genf)
3: Stem cells (Karlheinz Krause, Genf, & Marcel Leist, Konstanz)
4: Cellular aging (Alexander Bürkle, Konstanz, & Thomas von Zglinicki, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK)
5: Chemical approaches in Cell Biology (Thomas U. Mayer, Konstanz)
6: Tissue remodelling (Wieland Huttner, Dresden)
7: Cell polarity (Kai Simons, Dresden)
8: Regulation of the cell cycle (Ingrid Hoffmann, Heidelberg & Erich Nigg, Martinsried)
9: The cellular basis of innate immunity (Bruno Lemaître, Lausanne)
10: Label-free microscopic methods (Andreas Zumbusch, Konstanz)

More detailed information to the program, registration, abstract submission etc. is again available at the zellbiologie website
www.zellbiologie2009.de

In the download section you now can find the application documents for the 2009 Werner-Risau-Prize. As in the previous years, this prize will again be awarded during the Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Zellbiologie, which will be organized from March 24-27, 2009 in Konstanz this time, together with colleagues from Switzerland. So the audience will be even more "international" than in the previous years and the awardee will have a very unique platform to present his work. Therefore, if you think you might be qualified, then don´t hesitate to apply - or hurry up and do the experiments that have to be done to finish your paper!!