Today, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) presented the Wittgenstein Award, Austria’s leading research prize, to Elly Tanaka, Scientific Director of IMBA. The award honors Tanaka’s groundbreaking research on the regeneration of complex body structures using salamanders as a model. Studying their main research model, the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), Tanaka and her group have identified the cells and mechanisms that enable these animals to regenerate their limbs and several other organs, including the spinal cord and brain. Tanaka is the third IMBA scientist to receive the Wittgenstein Award, following IMBA Founding Director Josef Penninger and Deputy Director Jürgen Knoblich.
The Wittgenstein Award is the highest and most prestigious research award given in Austria for a scientist at an Austrian research institution. It honors lifetime achievements and is given in support of research efforts that can be particularly bold. Elly Tanaka’s legacy builds on the reviving of axolotls as a premier research model in regeneration and development.
Axolotls are sometimes considered the longest-serving lab animals and have been in continuous use as models in biology since 1863. With the rise of molecular biology since the 1940s, however, other animal models replaced the salamanders at the forefront of research - new molecular tools for mice or fruit flies drove attention to these systems. Since the 1990s, Elly Tanaka’s research has made crucial contributions to bringing the axolotl back to center stage: her lab developed lines of genetically modified animals serving a global community of axolotl researchers; adapted molecular tools of mice and other systems so they could also be applied to axolotls; and deciphered the extremely complex axolotl genome, then the biggest known genome of any animal (published in 2018).
Former students and postdocs of Elly Tanaka can be found leading groups in research centers around the World, and her lab and axolotl colony with more than 240 lines of transgenic animals serves is hub and focal point for a global community of regeneration researchers. Most importantly Elly Tanaka has made groundbreaking discoveries on the molecular and cellular foundations of regeneration. This included the discovery that a certain cell types de-differentiate to acquire stem-cell-like features at the start of regeneration; the identification of molecules that trigger and pattern regenerating limbs; and most recently, a molecular cue that underlies the positional memory of regenerating tissues.
Most recently, Tanaka’s team identified the gene Hand2 as the key factor telling cells in the axolotl arm where they are and what structures to rebuild after injury. Their findings were published in the journal Nature in May.
Tanaka’s work also extends beyond salamanders, exploring why and how mammals have lost their regenerative abilities over the course of evolution. Her team has demonstrated that fibroblasts —cells that contribute to scar formation in mammals—function differently in the axolotl, where they are acquire stem cell-like states after injury to enable the axolotl’s remarkable ability to regenerate its limbs.
Tanaka’s research also builds the foundation for developing new strategies for regenerating or replacing mammalian tissue, holding potential for human medicine: for example, Tanaka’s team has successfully induced human embryonic stem cells to form retinal tissue, including the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a pigmented layer of the retina crucial to vision and often linked to progressive blindness. Tanaka and her team use these cells to screen potential drugs to repair defects in RPE cells. In other projects, Tanaka and her team investigate heart regeneration in the axolotl and how new neural circuits are wired after injury.
"I am extremely grateful to receive the Wittgenstein Award from the Austrian Science Fund. This recognition acknowledges past efforts of many members of my lab, and energizes our future ambitions.” Tanaka commented. “The award comes at an exciting time for the field of regeneration research, where new discoveries are rapidly reshaping our understanding of tissue repair and plasticity. The Wittgenstein Award will allow me to invest in the next generation of scientists, to give young researchers in the lab the freedom and resources to explore how findings from the axolotl can be translated to mammalian systems. I look forward to the advances this will catalyze—not only in our lab, but across the broader regenerative biology community worldwide. This award merits hard work of scientists in my lab, a big community at the Vienna BioCenter, our friends and partners in the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the wider life science community of Austria that has become incredibly powerful in recent years."
Elly Tanaka studied biochemistry at the University of California in San Francisco, USA, and at Harvard University in Boston, USA. After a research stay at the Ludwig Cancer Research Institute in London, UK, she moved to the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. Since 2008, she has held a professorship for animal models of regeneration at the Technical University of Dresden. From 2014 to 2016, she also served as director of the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD). From 2016 to 2024, she worked as a senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. Since 2024, Tanaka has been the Scientific Director at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Vienna. In 2024, Elly Tanaka was admitted to Leopoldina in the Genetics/Molecular Biology and Cell Biology Section.
Austria’s most prestigious science prize, the Wittgenstein Award recognizes outstanding researchers for their exceptional scientific achievements and international impact. Named after the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the award is granted by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and provides up to €1.9 million in flexible funding to empower pioneering research with a long-term vision, reinforcing Austria’s position at the forefront of global science.