(Vienna, 20 May 2025) Stefan Mereiter, postdoctoral researcher at MedUni Vienna's Clinical Department of Laboratory Medicine and at IMBA, has been awarded a grant from the Austrian Science Fund FWF. The project, which is funded as part of the "FWF Individual Projects International" funding programme, investigates sialylation - the targeted attachment of sialic acid to proteins and lipids in the body.
This collaborative research project between the Medical University of Vienna and Nagoya University focuses on sialylation, i.e. the targeted attachment of sialic acid to proteins and lipids in the body. Sialylation plays an important role in many processes in the body, such as the organisation of cells, cooperation with beneficial bacteria and the control of defence reactions of the immune system. Stefan Mereiter and his colleagues have discovered that the mammary glands exhibit very complex patterns of this sialylation, that very special sialylated molecules occur in breast milk and that altered sialylation can play an important role in the development of breast cancer.
As part of the project, Stefan Mereiter wants to use modern organoid models, i.e. mini-organs in the Petri dish, of mammary glands to find out how signals from pregnancy and inflammation influence sialylation in the mammary gland. He will study the unique sialylation patterns of breast milk to understand how they contribute to offspring health and explore how sialylation patterns of healthy mammary gland cells differ from those of cancer cells to provide the basis for new approaches for the development of tests and therapies.
About the person
Stefan Mereiter studied Molecular Biology at the University of Vienna and went to Japan for his Master's degree in 2011. For his doctorate, he then worked in Portugal and Sweden, where he researched the role of glycans - including sialic acids - in the development of cancer as part of an international EU project with partner institutions from nine countries. After completing his PhD, he returned to Vienna in 2019 to further investigate the function of glycans in cancer using state-of-the-art methods in Josef Penninger's team. Stefan Mereiter has published 33 papers to date in the fields of glycobiology, immunology and cancer research and has received several scientific awards, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the EU and the ESPRIT Fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund.