Bottom-up Synthetic Immunology: New Strategies Against Infection and Cancer. Infectious diseases such as AIDS and malaria, along with hard-to-treat cancers like pancreatic and brain tumors, continue to pose major global health challenges. Despite significant progress, effective preventive or curative measures remain elusive for many of these conditions. A shared feature of these diseases is their ability to evade the immune system—often through similar mechanisms. Yet, targeted interventions to modulate the complex interactions between immune cells and tissues remain limited, and experimental models to study such interventions are still in their infancy.

SyNergy — the Munich Cluster of Systems Neurology — defined Systems Neurology as a new research field where systems-level biology and systems neuroscience meet clinical neurology. Backed by the two Munich Excellence universities and five Helmholtz and Max Planck institutes, this long-term program has yielded remarkable insights and established permanent infrastructure.

The central vision of the Cluster of Excellence SCALE (Subcellular Architecture of Life) is to understand the molecular principles that govern the internal organization of cells. SCALE investigates how cellular structures are formed, how they dynamically change, and how they communicate with one another in health, stress, and disease.

The RESIST Cluster of Excellence team is committed to helping people who are particularly susceptible to infections. These include newborns, senior citizens and people with weakened immune systems. For them, viruses and bacteria can be not only stressful, but often life-threatening.

The Cluster of Excellence “Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation” (PMI) investigates how chronic inflammations can be better understood, treated, and prevented on an individual basis. A particular focus lies on translational clinical research.

PhenoRob represents a sustainable, technology-driven transformation of agriculture. The Cluster of Excellence addresses the central challenge of making crop production more efficient, resource-conserving, and sustainable at the same time. The aim is to explore new pathways for future-oriented crop production through novel technology-driven approaches and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Nucleic acid research has continued to provide groundbreaking insights into fundamental biological mechanisms. Originally considered primarily as carriers of genetic information, we now know that nucleic acids can also play an active role, for example as catalysts of enzymatic reactions, as structural components of macromolecular complexes, as guide and scaffold structures, as regulators and even as signaling molecules and ligands (nucleic acids as ‘subjects’).

The focus of our cluster of excellence is on understanding neurological and psychiatric disorders. The aim of this interdisciplinary research network is to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying disease mechanisms and, on this basis, to develop new therapeutic approaches.

One of the most spectacular of all animal behaviours is the ability to precisely navigate over vast distances. Transcontinental flights of tiny insects with minute brains or the global movements of billions of birds, sometimes to destinations never previously visited, are remarkable feats which are still barely understood. The scientific mission of NaviSense is to provide a thorough, interdisciplinary understanding of the senses and mechanisms used by animals to navigate, and how these mechanisms can inspire technology and impact society, ecology, and biodiversity.

The goal of the cluster of excellence Multiscale Bioimaging: from Molecular Machines to Networks of Excitable Cells (MBExC) is to decipher disease-relevant nanoscale functional units in cardiac and neural excitable cells.