HI-TAC Spring Symposium International Conference: How Vessels and Heart Communicate with Other Organs
24 April 2025
Helmholtz Institute for Translational AngioCardioScience to hold HI-TAC Spring Symposium
Blood vessels and the heart form a communication center exchanging information with all other organs. How their interplay can foster a healthy life or promote diseases is the topic of research at the Helmholtz Institute for Translational AngioCardioScience (HI-TAC), a joint institution of the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin and the Medical Faculties Mannheim and Heidelberg of Heidelberg University. HI-TAC is hosting an international conference on 28 and 29 April 2025. Around 150 researchers are due to attend the “HI-TAC Spring Symposium – Angioscience meets Cardioscience” at Heidelberg University in order to exchange knowledge from vascular biomedicine, systems biology and cardiac research.
The Helmholtz Institute for Translational AngioCardioScience was founded in 2023 with the aim of combining expertise on cardiac, vascular and systems biology. The scientists participating in the institute investigate communication within the cardiovascular system and at the interface with the nervous system, immune system and metabolism to discover how these findings can be used to maintain lifelong healthy organs and how we can age in a healthy way. Interim directors of HI-TAC are Prof. Dr Norbert Hübner from the Max Delbrück Center, head of the working group “Genetics and Genomics of Cardiovascular Diseases”, as well as Prof. Dr Gergana Dobreva and Prof. Dr Johannes Backs, who both teach and do research at Heidelberg University. Prof. Dobreva heads the Department of Cardiovascular Genomics and Epigenomics at the Medical Faculty Mannheim; Prof. Backs is the director of the Institute of Experimental Cardiology located at the Medical Faculty Heidelberg and Heidelberg University Hospital.
With the “HI-TAC Spring Symposium – Angioscience meets Cardioscience”, the HI-TAC directorate intend to bring together leading experts from heart and vessel research, along with systems biology, in order to encourage new cases of collaboration and a strong interdisciplinary specialist community in the still young research field of AngioCardioScience. Opening the conference will be Prof. Dr Maike Sander, Scientific Director of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association, and Prof. Dr Frauke Melchior, Rector of Heidelberg University. Prof. Dr Sergij Goerdt, Dean of the Medical Faculty Mannheim, and his Heidelberg counterpart Prof. Dr Michael Boutros will add their words of welcome. Different blocks at the conference will take up topics such as angiocardiac communication in systemic health, or the question of how fundamental findings from AngioCardioScience can be used for clinical innovations.
The Helmholtz Institute of Translational AngioCardioScience (HI-TAC) is an external branch of the Max Delbrück Center based at the campus of Heidelberg University. HI-TAC was jointly founded by the Berlin-based Max Delbrück Center and the Medical Faculties Mannheim and Heidelberg of Heidelberg University.
Note for newsrooms
The “HI-TAC Spring Symposium – Angioscience meets Cardioscience” is taking place on 28 April in the Great Hall of the Old University and on 29 April in the Great Hall of the New University. Media representatives are warmly invited to attend and report. Registration is required with presse@mdc-berlin.de.