Environmental Changes and Disease  

Themes of the Research Area

The human organism is exposed to a variety of stress and risk factors caused by personal life styles as well as external influences (e.g. poor diet, lack of exercise, consummation of tobacco and alcohol, stress, environmental factors). These factors often lead to the major modern lifestyle diseases / diseases of civilisation:

• Coronary-vascular diseases (atherosclerosis, heart attacks, strokes)
• Metabolic diseases (diabetes mellitus, lipid metabolism disorders such as high cholesterol, obesity)
• Tumour diseases

Developing these diseases depends to a great extent on activity and dietary behaviour. In addition to disease-associated impairment in the quality of life, diseases of civilisation impose a considerable financial burden on health systems. Treating cardiovascular diseases alone, the leading cause of death in Germany, costs 35 billion Euro per year, and lifestyle diseases are calculated to account for 30 % of all healthcare costs, at more than 70 billion Euro per year.

However, there is just as little consensus about the exact causes of lifestyle diseases as over the actual diseases themselves. It is also not at all clear why individual people react quite differently to known risk factors. What is sure is that not one single factor, but probably an interaction between genetic susceptibility, life style and environmental factors, eventually leads to disease and particularly to different degrees of severity. Scientific investigations of these themes form the main focus of the ‘Leipzig Interdisciplinary Research Cluster of Genetic Factors, Clinical Phenotypes and Environment (LIFE)’ (funded through the State Excellence Initiative).

This top-level Research Area provides a platform for an interdisciplinary network of outstanding Leipzig scientists, whose research has the following predominant aims:

• Understanding the burden and dynamics of these diseases in the population
• Determining the genetic contribution to complex (poly-genetic) life style diseases
• Determining the disease diversity following environmental and life style changes
• Developing and testing early recognition and/or screening procedures
• Preparing intervention studies, for example to prevent diseases; prevention of life style diseases in a medical-sociological environment.

Various aspects of the research area’s theme “Environmental Changes and Diseases” are being investigated in numerous collaborative research projects, for example:

• The Leipzig Interdisciplinary Research Cluster of Genetic Factors, Clinical Phenotypes and Environment LIFE – EFRE, ESF and State Funding
• The Integrated Research and Treatment Centre (IFB) ‘Adiposity Diseases’ (BMBF funding)
• Clinical Research Group ‘Atherobesity: Adipose Tissue and Vasculature’ (DFG funding)
• Joint project of the medical genome research (NGFN-Plus) ‘Comparative genetics of atherosclerosis modifying genes’ (BMBF funding)
• IZKF joint project ‘LIPIGENETICS: Comparative and functional genomics of lipid metabolism’

Unique in terms of technology and equipment is the Biobank funded by State grants. Within the context of the LIFE research programme it is under the expert direction of the Institute for Laboratory Medicine, Clinical Chemistry and Molecular Diagnostics. The associated databank is the responsibility of the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology.

The LIFE Biobank is a computer-controlled freezer for extremely sensitive human samples, and at the same time a modern medical information storage facility. As part of the LIFE project over a million samples, mainly blood and its components, or urine, but also cells from more than 30,000 study participants are stored under highly standardized conditions in the bank. For later analysis of the highly sensitive proteins (proteome analyses) and metabolic products (metabolites) that are important for the development of new diagnostics and therapies, it is essential to ensure the best storage quality of the samples over many years to come.

The first stage of the Leipzig LIFE Biobank for medicine comprises 5 liquid nitrogen cryo-tanks, planned to be extended to 10 – although already in this form it is quite unique worldwide in a university environment.