We are happy to announce that Giulio Superti-Furga, CeMM´s Scientific Director, and Kaan Boztug, Director of the newly founded Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases (LBI-RUD) and Adjunct PI at CeMM, together with their teams consisting of researchers from different biomedical disciplines and clinical scientists were awarded with 2 WWTF grants for precision medicine.

This Life Science call addressed universities and non-university research institutions in Vienna who want to conduct a cutting-edge research project with a major focus on precision medicine based on ‘Omics’ technologies and patient cohorts. In total, 5 Mio. € were dedicated to this call. 5 projects will be funded in total.

The research team coordinated by Giulio Superti-Furga submitted a project proposal to discover effective, personalized therapy options for refractory blood cancers resistant to conventional treatment. Using a novel, automated confocal microscopy method developed at CeMM, “pharmacoscopy” can predict the efficacy of drugs even in smallest samples and above that should provide valuable insights for further pharmacological research. The project will be performed under the lead of Giulio Superti-Furga and Ulrich Jäger from the Medical University of Vienna.

Kaan Boztug’s group at the LBI-RUD, together with CeMM PI Jörg Menche, should identify and characterize novel disorders of the human immune system and provide proof-of-concept for the combined use of functional genomics, network biology and drug screening approaches to identify personalized treatment options. Primary immunodeficiencies (PID´s) have immensely enhanced the understanding of the core components involved in human immunity. Boztug’s group will use PID’s as model diseases to rationalize patient-specific workflows from gene discovery and pathomechanisms to targeted treatment, rendering these disorders paradigmatic models to establish principles of molecular-guided, stratified treatment.

For more information, please visit: www.wwtf.at/programmes/ls/