At ISAS, Prof Dr Anika Grüneboom (née Klingberg) heads the Bioimaging research group and, in a cooperation arrangement under the “Jülich model” with the medical faculty of the University Hospital Essen and the University of Duisburg-Essen, she holds the professorship for “Experimental Biomedical Imaging” there.
Grüneboom’s research primarily focuses on how the granulocyte neutrophil and macrophage immune cells communicate with endothelial cells. To gain a deep insight into the cellular and sub-cellular processes of autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, the immunologist and her team use not only imaging methods such as light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) but also confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) or two-photon laser-scanning microscopy (TPLSM). Combining these two different technologies makes it possible to perform a cross-scale analysis of biological samples.
Following her biology degree at RWTH Aachen University, Grüneboom returned to Essen, the city where she was born, in 2007 to write her PhD thesis at University Hospital Essen. It was here that the trained immunologist developed a clearing protocol that renders bone and soft tissue transparent and does not require any hazardous chemicals. Furthermore, it makes it possible to preserve endogenous fluorescence proteins for several weeks or even months. Grüneboom’s procedure allows entire mouse organs to be analysed without destroying the sample. Together with her Essen-based colleagues, Grüneboom succeeded in using light sheet fluorescence microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging to make visible a previously undiscovered vascular system in the bones of mice and subsequently of humans. Prior to her appointment at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2020, Grüneboom worked as a post-doc researcher and junior research group leader in the department of Rheumatology and Immunology at the Universitätsklinikum Erlangen from 2017 to 2020.