The Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich

The Center for Drug Research covers all research areas around the development of novel drug – from chemical synthesis to innovative formulations. At the Chair of Pharmaceutical Biology (Prof. Dr. Angelika Vollmar) we investigate the pharmaceutical potential of natural compounds, be it of plant, animal or microbial origin.

Our main focus lies on tumor biology, with tumor angiogenesis (Prof. Dr. Stefan Zahler) as a central topic. Inhibiting the vessel growth in tumors in order to “starve” the malignancy is an old therapeutic concept, which has led to some clinical success, but still has its limits: due to evasive strategies of the tumors and to development of resistances we are still in need of novel therapeutic targets and inhibitors of angiogenesis.
Therefore, not only try to get a better academic understanding of the angiogenesis process, but also screen novel inhibitors. More complex angiogenesis assays, like the tube formation assay, are image based and tedious to evaluate by hand.

Therefore they often are of limited use for screening purposes. The WimTube module overcomes this problem: it enables a robust rational evaluation of tube formation assays, and allows us to use this assay in a medium throughput screening approach.
In addition to the highly reproducible analysis, we also get valuable morphological information, which has to date not been used in classical evaluation routines.