CeMM-Director Giulio Superti-Furga receives another ERC funding worth 150.000 Euro to further foster the development of precision medicine.

Hematological malignancies like leukemia tend to be heterogeneous and genetically complex, which makes it difficult for the treating physician to find the right drug at the right time. This is even more true when it comes to a relapse of the disease that requires the use of off-label drugs. With a new technique, developed at CeMM, available drugs can be screened for their effect on the cells of a diseased individual in real time, with the goal of improving the treatment prediction and providing an optimal personalized therapy.

Using a liquid biopsy from bone marrow, blood or lymph, the diseased cells of a patient can be treated in vitro with thousands of compounds in parallel. Subsequently, fluorescent antibodies and probes against diagnostic markers are applied and the drug action is systematically evaluated by automated microscopy and single-cell image analysis.

The funding of this ERC Proof of Concept Grant will allow to perform systematic retrospective trials to proof the potential of the technique in personalized medicine and drug discovery for a broad spectrum of hematological disorders together with the Department of Hematology and Hemostaseology at the Medical University of Vienna. It is the fourth funding award of the ERC that Giulio Superti-Furga receives for his research in precision medicine. In 2009 and 2016, he has been awarded with the ERC Advanced Grant, in 2011 he received his first ERC Proof of Concept Grant. The ERC Proof of Concept Grants are designed to support ERC grantees with the commercial or societal application of the results of their funded research.