Distinguished Speakers Seminar Series
Programmed Cells? Single-cell Biology and Cell Engineering for Immunity and Cancer
Seminar Series Details:
About Christoph Bock (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Univ of Vienna)
Christoph Bock is a Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Professor of Medical Informatics and Head of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the Medical University of Vienna. Christoph Bock is also scientific coordinator of the Biomedical Sequencing Facility of CeMM and MedUni Vienna, member of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee, fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and elected board member of the Young Academy in the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
He has received important research awards, including an ERC Starting Grant (2016-2021), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021-2026), the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (2009), the Overton Prize of the International Society for Computational Biology (2017), and the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022). He has been included in the global list of “Highly Cited Researchers” by Clarivate Analytics (ISI Web of Science) each year since 2019. He co-founded Myllia Biotechnology, a Vienna-based startup company that develops and applies single-cell methods for high-throughput biology and drug discovery.
About this Class
Dr. Bocks' research utilizes a synergistic "READ, LEARN, WRITE" framework that combines multi-omics profiling, deep learning, and high-throughput CRISPR screening to map, model, and program complex cellular functions. By integrating single-cell technologies to read epigenetic states with advanced neural networks to learn their regulatory circuits, he can systematically design and write new biological instructions into human cells. They successfully applied this integrated approach to optimize immunotherapy, using large-scale in vivo CRISPR screens to identify and validate gene knockouts that significantly boost the performance of CAR T cells against solid tumors.