Phase Transition in Disease

 

Over the course of acute and multiphase chronic medical diseases, clinically critical changes have a significant influence on the further course and prognosis of the disease.

Phase transition is the evolution of a disease from one phase to the next. Examples of phase transition in acute situations include irreversible organ loss. In chronic inflammation of organs or organ systems this transition can be the malignant transformation from something chronically reversible to an irreversible condition.

A better understanding of the phase transition in disease is thus an important problem in order to better understand the molecular mechanisms causing these transitions, to identify predictors, to predict this transitions, and finally to develop molecular target structures for therapeutic modulation.

This topic is the focus of work in SFB-TRR 57 and one of the IZKF researcher groups. It has consistently been applied in therapies in GRK 2375.