Professor Tobias Ruck from the Department of Neurology at the BG University Hospital Bergmannsheil Bochum
Medicine
I Connect Patient Care and the Lab
How to translate findings from the lab into practice is what fascinates Tobias Ruck. A one-way street, he believes, is no solution.
I connect patient care and the laboratory – with the ever-present risk of misalignment. What looks elegant in the lab doesn’t always help at the bedside. And sometimes, the best research questions don’t start at the microscope but in conversations with patients. This “translational bridge-building” was also the focus of my inaugural lecture at Ruhr University Bochum.
In neurology, we encounter both common conditions like strokes and dementias and rare diseases of the nerves and muscles – some of which take far longer to diagnose than we’d like. My work explores how we can combine clinical observations, molecular insights, biomarkers, imaging, and digital monitoring to develop better diagnostics and new therapies. The bridge must carry traffic in both directions: from research into care and from the challenges faced by patients back into the lab. Otherwise, translation remains a one-way street: a concept that might work in city traffic but has no place in medicine.
