Christoph Merten Co-Awarded a Major SNSF Sinergia Grant
© 2020 EPFL
Christoph Merten, Associate Professor at the Institute of Bioengineering (School of Engineering), has been awarded a Sinergia 2020 grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
Christoph Merten is part of a Lausanne-based consortium led by Dr. Alexandre Harari from the Department of Oncology at University of Lausanne (UNIL) and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV). In collaboration with Professors David Gfeller and Vincent Zoete at UNIL and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the researchers from the three institutions, all affiliated as well to the Lausanne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), are working to establish new cancer therapies.
The Swiss National Science Foundation has awarded the consortium a grant of 2.3 million Swiss Francs for their proposal titled "Deciphering the target landscape of tumor-specific T Cell Receptors: a bench-to-bits-to-bedside approach", aimed at developing technologies allowing to better understand the immune response to cancer, focusing in particular on molecular cues from tumors rather than on cellular assays, as is the current standard in immunotherapy. To reach their goals, the interdisciplinary team of researchers from CHUV, UNIL and EPFL will be able to draw on unique expertise in the fields of cellular immunology, bioinformatics, molecular modelling and microfluidics.
In addition to enabling scientific breakthroughs, this Sinergia grant should help pave the way for the development of new vaccine or cell-therapy based treatments for cancer patients.