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This year, the Friends of the VMF will award the Hans Schleiter Prize to two junior scientists for their outstanding publications.
The junior scientist Dr. Nicole Schütze receives one of the two awards for her publication in 2019 of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (VMF).

In the last few years, Dr. Nicole Schütze has established the working area "Porcine Immunology" at the Institute of Immunology in cooperation with the Institute of Bacteriology and Mycology. In a short time she has succeeded in establishing reagents and methods to investigate immune reactions of pigs.

This cooperation has resulted in a series of very good publications and extensive third-party funding. In 2019, Dr. Schütze, as senior author, and her co-authors were able to demonstrate significant protection against certain serotypes of the bacterium Streptococcus suis in a vaccine study. This serotype causes major economic and animal welfare damage in piglets in Europe. The research is of particular importance, as no vaccine against this important serotype has been approved to date.

Dr. Schütze was able to detect vaccine antigen-specific T cells by flow cytometry, which was a major technical and methodological challenge due to the small numbers involved. Scientists from three independent institutes of the VMF contributed to the publication, this interdisciplinary approach contributed greatly to the success of the project and the accompanying publication, which makes an important contribution to vaccine and basic research in swine.

Publication: 

Vaccine X. 2019 Oct 10;3:100046. doi: 10.1016/j.jvacx.2019.100046.