Interview Empowering Cells’ and Scientists’ Potential for Cell Therapies

"I want to create cells ‘à la carte’ to facilitate cell therapies that can cure brain injuries and degenerative diseases."
_{Prof. Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla, Director of the Stem Cell Center (rotating), Director of the Institute for Epigenetics and Stem Cells, Director of Biomedicine at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus, Helmholtz
Munich}

Having started her career with research on parasites, Prof. Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla’s fascination was early drawn to the research field of epigenetics. Epigenetics is about adjusting to the environment – and this is also in Maria-Elena’s nature: She likes to make decisions paving the way to achieve the goal.

METP: I like working with people and I like to bring them to work together efficiently. I also like to help people to do more than what they think they can do: I enjoy making decisions that I think could be helpful for other people, to make sure that people are doing things in a better way or going beyond their own limits. To have the bigger picture and empower people to make impactful decisions that bring them or a project forward, is something that makes me happy.

"It is in my nature to get inspired by my team members."
_{Prof. Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla}

METP: I think it is important to have not only the bigger picture in mind but also every individual person in your team with their own needs and abilities: The head of a team has to know what makes people happy: From the most senior person to the youngest trainee, regardless of what they work on.

METP: In mammals, epigenetic reprogramming, the acquisition and loss of totipotency, and the first cell fate decision all occur within a three-to-six-day window after fertilization of the oocyte by the sperm. We need to have more detailed knowledge about the molecular processes to uncover principles of stem cells, chromatin biology, and thus regenerative medicine.

METP: Understanding how cells make their own thing has a tremendous potential impact on health research: We can open avenues by finding answers to the questions of why a specific cell in your body, in the skin for example, does one thing and a cell in a neuron does another – and how a cell has the capacity to do that. With this knowledge, we have ways to reprogram cells and generate novel therapies. Basically, it is like engineering cells for what we want them to be.

METP: We focus on bringing cells back to totipotency, to the state they had at the beginning of life: in the embryo. However, we do not create a new being by doing so, we just generate cells, which are very plastic. We envisage these cells can be used to replace injured or disabled ones to cure for example neurodegenerative diseases or brain injuries.
Also, it is important to know that all this research is very strongly regulated ethically and legally,– not only in Germany or Bavaria but internationally.

"Epigenetics is a link that can put together a lot of the different scientific research fields to develop therapies for brain diseases."
_{Prof. Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla}

METP: Epigenetics can truly link together a lot of the different scientific research fields, from metabolic deregulation to our interactions with the environment but also to develop cell-based therapies.
With Epigenetics@HelmholtzMunich we gather the expertise of various disciplines and topics. Scientists in the field of epigenetics have a common language: We can talk to colleagues of other disciplines and research fields, regardless of whether they study in the field of lung diseases like COPD or diabetes on reprograming beta cells. Epigenetics is the research that can explain why we are how we are, and help to cure diseases based on cell disfunction and cell loss.

Latest update: February 2024.