Immunology Seminar Series

April 7th at 14-15 (Finland time)
Virtual event
Flyer

Christoph Bock, CeMM (Austrian Academy of Sciences) & Medical University of Vienna: Programmed Cells? Single-cell Biology, Epigenetics and Cell Engineering in Immunity and Cancer

Register for the Immunology Seminar Series email list to get calendar invitation to the online seminar: https://link.webropolsurveys.com/S/D29C32AA6E8A2F7A

Host: Professor Riitta Lahesmaa ( rilahes@utu.fi )

Immunology seminar series is jointly organised by the Finnish Society for Immunology, InFLAMES Flagship and Turku Bioscience. For further information contact Anne Lahdenperä  ( ankahy@utu.fi ) or Riitta Lahesmaa ( rilahes@utu.fi ), University of Turku.

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. His research combines experimental biology (single-cell sequencing, epigenetics, CRISPR screening, bioengineering) with computational methods (bioinformatics, machine learning, artificial intelligence) – for cancer, immunology, and precision medicine. Before coming to Vienna in 2012, he was a postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (2008-2011) and a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2004-2008). Christoph Bock is also scientific coordinator of the Biomedical Sequencing Facility at CeMM, member of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee, fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). He has received important research awards, including an ERC Starting Grant (2016-2021) and 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).

Selected publications:

• Schaefer M, Peneder P, Malzl D, Lombardo SD, Peycheva M, Burton J, Hakobyan A, Sharma V, Krausgruber T, Sin C, Menche J, Tomazou EM, Bock C (2025). Multimodal learning enables chat-based exploration of single-cell data. Nature Biotechnology, DOI: 10.1038/s41587-025-02857-9.
• Datlinger P, Pankevich EV, Arnold CD, Pranckevicius N, Lin J, Romanovskaia D, Schaefer M, Piras F, Orts AC, Nemc A, Biesaga P, Chan M, Neuwirth T, Artemov AV, Li W, Ladstätter S, Krausgruber T, Bock C (2025). Systematic discovery of CRISPR-boosted CAR T cell immunotherapies. Nature, 646, 963-972.
• Traxler P, Reichl S, Folkman L, Shaw L, Fife V, Nemc A, Barreca D, Fortelny N, Rendeiro AF, Halbritter F, Weninger W, Decker T, Farlik M#, Bock C (2025). Integrated time-series analysis and high-content CRISPR screening delineate the dynamics of macrophage immune regulation. Cell Systems 16, 101346.
• Fortelny N, Farlik M, Fife V, Gorki AD, Lassnig C, Maurer B, Meissl K, Dolezal M, Boccuni L, Ravi Sundar Jose Geetha A, Akagha MJ, Karjalainen A, Shoebridge S, Farhat A, Mann U, Jain R, Tikoo S, Zila N, Esser-Skala W, Kraus­gruber T, Sitnik K, Penz T, Hladik A, Suske T, Zahalka S, Senekowitsch M, Barreca D, Halbritter F, Macho-Maschler S, Weninger W, Neubauer HA, Moriggl R, Knapp S, Sexl V, Strobl B, Decker T, Müller M, Bock C (2024). JAK-STAT signaling maintains homeostasis in T cells and macrophages. Nature Immunology 5, 847-859.
• Moorlag S, Folkman L, ter Horst R, Krausgruber T, Barreca D, Schuster LC, Fife V, Matzaraki V, Li W, Reichl S, Mourits VP, Koeken V, de Bree LCJ, Dijkstra H, Lemmers H, van Cranenbroek B, van Rijssen E, Koenen H, Joosten I, Xu C-J, Li Y, Joosten LAB, van Crevel R, Netea MG, Bock C (2024). Multi-omics analysis of innate and adaptive responses to BCG vaccination reveals epigenetic cell states that predict trained immunity. Immunity 57, 171-187 e114.