With over 40,000 students, the University of Hamburg (UHH) is the largest university in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the largest research and training institution in northern Germany and one of the ten largest universities in Germany. The UHH has been recognized as a university of excellence in Germany since July 2019 and currently operates four clusters of excellence.

As part of the project TherSys – Theranostic Systems for Accelerated Translation – the research activities are carried out by Prof. Florian Grüner’s working group in the Institute for Experimental Physics. The Grüner group takes a leading role in the field of synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence imaging (XFI). With the help of XFI, the research group wants to track labeled lipid nanoparticles in preclinical studies, which enables direct access to the biodistribution of the injected nanoparticles. Furthermore, the scientists involved aim to further develop the XFI method so that the spatial release of the active ingredient molecules contained in the lipid nanoparticles can also be measured. In addition to experiments at the synchrotron PETRA-III in Hamburg, a laboratory prototype from the group around Grüner will be used to demonstrate that XFI can also be used independently of large-scale synchrotron systems in the future.