Elena Conti receives prestigious Jung Prize for Medicine
Award ceremony on May 15, Jung-Symposium featuring the research findings of this year's award winners on May 16.
Which molecular mechanisms are responsible for the controlled degradation of mRNA molecules? How are mRNAs packaged, safeguarded and transported through the crowded cellular environment to reach the protein-synthesis machineries? These questions are at the center of Elena Conti's research. On May 15, 2025, the director at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich will be awarded the prestigious Jung Prize for Science and Research.
Elena Conti, director and head of the research department "Structural Cell Biology" at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, researches how cells recognise and degrade defective messenger RNAs (mRNAs). She is particularly interested in disease-relevant mutations in these mechanisms, which she is decoding using the latest methods. Disorders in this process can favour neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), certain types of cancer and genetic metabolic disorders. Her work in this field has made a decisive contribution to understanding the interplay of molecular machines.
For Conti, science is a passion that she discovered over the years – inspired by excellent teachers and mentors. ‘For me, research is like a big jigsaw puzzle. You collect individual observations, put them together and suddenly a picture emerges,’ she says, describing her fascination.
Conti shares this year's prize with Prof. Dr. Jörn Piel, head of the Bacterial Natural Products research group at the Institute of Microbiology at ETH Zurich. She intends to use her share of the prize money to pursue a new, promising hypothesis on a specific mutation in the exosome, a complex that plays a key role in RNA degradation. The prize will be awarded on May 15, 2025 in Hamburg.
About the awardee
Professor Elena Conti studied Chemistry at the University of Pavia in Italy. She received her PhD in Protein Crystallography at Imperial College, London, UK in 1997. After a postdoctoral fellowship in John Kuriyan’s lab at The Rockefeller University, New York, USA, she was appointed Group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1999. While at EMBL she focused her research interest on mechanisms of RNA export to the cytoplasm and the structure and function of the molecular machines involved. Since then, Conti’s work shifted to understanding molecular mechanisms regulating RNA degradation in the nucleus and cytoplasm, in particular those that impact quality control pathways. She was appointed Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried near Munich, Germany in 2006 where she leads the department of “Structural Cell Biology”. Since 2007, she is Honorary Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Conti received numerous awards, among others the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2008 and the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2014.
Invitation to the 5th Jung Symposium
Anyone wishing to delve deeper into the research findings of this year's award winners will have the opportunity to do so on 16th May 2025. At the 5th Jung Symposium ‘Excellence in Human Medicine 2025’, Prof. Elena Conti, PhD, Prof. Dr Jörn Piel, Prof. Wolf-Herman Fridman and Dr med. Benjamin Ruf will present their work in exciting talks. The event will take place from 13:00 to 16:00 in the Ian K. Karan Lecture Hall, Campus Lehre (Building N55) of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and will also be broadcast via livestream. All information, the current programme and the opportunity to register are available at https://jung-stiftung.de/en/symposium-2025/. Participation is free of charge, but registration is requested.
About the Jung Foundation for Science and Research
The Jung Foundation for Science and Research, based in Hamburg, Germany, is an independent organization that annually provides up to three awards in recognition of fundamental and advanced research projects of significant clinical relevance. Since 1967, the foundation has invested more than 15 million euros in supporting researchers whose projects build a bridge between research and the bedside. Under the motto of ‘Excellence in human medicine’, the foundation makes a significant contribution to the development of new treatment methods. The Jung Prize for Medicine, the Jung Gold Medal for Medicine and the Jung Career Advancement Award for Medical Research are among the most highly endowed medical prizes in Europe. With the additional awarding of fellowships and German scholarships, the foundation provides a total funding of up to 650,000 euros annually. Further information at www.jung-stiftung.de/.
Glossary:
Exosome: is a barrel-shaped complex of nine protein subunits, with a tenth exoribonuclease protein that sits at the bottom of the barrel and cleaves the basic building blocks of mRNA, the ribonucleotides.
mRNA: abbreviation for messenger ribonucleic acid. Contains genetic information that serves as a blueprint for the primary structure of a protein. The linear molecule consists of four basic building blocks, the different ribonucleotides—adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil. The sequence of ribonucleotides determines the sequence of amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins.
Ribosomes: are known as the “protein factories” of cells. Here, the mRNA sequence is decoded in the process of translation into an amino acid sequence, the basic building blocks of proteins, and synthesized into amino acid chains.
