01.07.2026
Double success for Borstel tuberculosis research at the ESM Congress
Two female scientists from the Borstel Research Center, Leibniz Lung Center (FZB) have been honoured at this year’s Congress of the European Society of Mycobacteriology (ESM) in Verona: Dr ir. Margo Diricks received the 2026 Gertrud Meissner Prize, whilst Dr Viola Dreyer was awarded a poster prize.
The ESM awards the Gertrud Meissner Prize, endowed with 2,000 euros, annually to early-career researchers whose excellent and innovative research makes a significant contribution to the advancement of mycobacteriology. Margo Diricks particularly impressed the jury with her innovative contributions to the further development of genomic analysis methods in mycobacteriology. The award was presented last week at this year’s ESM Congress in Verona by Prof. Stefan Niemann, Programme Director of the Infections Programme Area at the FZB.
Margo Diricks holds a PhD in bioengineering and has been working in the ‘Molecular & Experimental Mycobacteriology’ research group at the FZB since 2020. Her research focuses on the detection, spread and development of resistance in mycobacteria, with a particular emphasis on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) and bacteria of the genus Haemophilus.
Her work centres on the development and application of genomic methods for the precise identification and typing of pathogens. These approaches make it possible to detect outbreaks at an early stage and to reliably trace routes of transmission.
For Mycobacterium abscessus, she also developed a cgMLST scheme – a genomic typing method for high-resolution analysis of the genetic relationships between bacteria – to investigate global populations and potential transmission events. Her research findings have been published in renowned journals such as Genome Medicine and Nature Communications.
Also from the ‘Molecular and Experimental Mycobacteriology’ research group is Dr Viola Dreyer, who was awarded a poster prize at the congress. In her poster, Viola Dreyer presented a method for detecting mixed infections involving two different strains of TB. The purely technical method was tested on almost 4,000 genome sequences from a prospective cohort in Ukraine, yielding a remarkable finding: just over four per cent of the infections were mixed infections. The mortality rate among these individuals was twice as high as that of the rest of the cohort.
Congratulations!