Life Sciences  
(Research Department BIO)

The Life Sciences Department is organized into the three units Biomolecular Research, Centre for Radiopharmaceutical Science and Division of Radiation Medicine. In each of these areas PSI offers excellent facilities and support for competitive research and development activities. Over the past years Biomolecular Research has been built up and strengthened and has now reached the critical mass needed for a stimulating and productive research environment.

Biomolecular Research is subdivided into the Structural Biology and the Molecular Cell Biology group. The former focusses on solving the structures of cytoskeletal proteins, proteins involved in RNA processing, DNA repair enzymes and on a variety of membrane proteins. The Molecular Cell Biology group has previously investigated various VEGFs (vascular endothelial growth factors) and VEGF receptors in the context of targeted tumor therapy. It has now become engaged in studying more basic mechanistic questions and aims to investigate the mechanism of receptor signalling in living cells and in vitro using fluorescently labelled receptor constructs. The final goal is to combine these functional studies with structural studies of receptor fragments and receptor/ligand complexes.

The Centre for Radiopharmaceutical Science pursues the vision to discover and characterize radiopharmaceuticals for treating metastatic tumours and to develop new PET tracers for the in vivo visualization of specific molecular functions. It  produces and incorporates radionuclides into specific ligands and develops targeting vehicles for in vitro and in vivo applications. Further progress with these potential radiopharmaceuticals requires small scale clinical trials for which collaborations with our partners in various university hospitals are essential.

In 2003, the Division of Radiation Medicine has treated 37 patients on the Spot Scanning Gantry and over 250 patients for ocular tumours in the OPTIS program. A new irradiation facility is currently developed in the interdisciplinary PROSCAN project. This will considerably enhance the capacity to treat patients and will allow an extension of the clinical R&D program on demonstrating the potential of proton therapy.