Jump to content

User:Polac Harry/sandbox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Professor
Christoph Merten
Christoph Merten in 2021
Born
NationalityGerman
Occupation(s)Professor and entrepreneur
Known forDevelopment of droplet-based microfluidic technologies for biomedical applications
Academic background
Alma materGoethe University of Frankfurt
Doctoral advisorChristian Buchholz
Academic work
DisciplineBioengineering
Sub-disciplineDroplet-based Microfluidics
InstitutionsEPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

Christoph Merten is a German bio-engineer and entrepreneur; currently Associate Professor at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). He is an adjunct scientist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne.[1] His research focuses on developing biomedical microfluidics technologies for drug discovery, diagnostics, and personalized therapy in cancer research.

Early life and education

[edit]

Merten was born in Bielefeld and graduated in 1999 with a diploma in biochemistry from the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he also studied organic chemistry until his intermediate degree (Vordiplom). He then pursued a Ph.D. at the Paul Ehrlich Institute, where he worked on the directed evolution of retroviral vectors, graduating in 2004. He then moved to the University of Cambridge, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Medical Research Council Laboratory for Molecular Biology, focusing on high-throughput screening using emulsion technologies.[2]

Career

[edit]

In 2005, he started a second postdoctoral appointment at the Institut de science et d'ingénierie supramoléculaires (ISIS) in Strasbourg, France.[3] He focused on droplet-based microfluidics for cellular assays and started his research group in 2007. From 2010 to 2019, he served as a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, where he established high-throughput droplet-based microfluidic screening platforms.[4]

In 2019, he was named associate professor of bioengineering at EPFL[5] and currently leads the laboratory for biomedical microfluidics (LBMM) within the School of Engineering.[6] He also holds an adjunct scientist position at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research's Lausanne branch.[7]

Research

[edit]

During his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Christian Buchholz at the Paul Ehrlich Institute, Merten's research focused on developing gene therapy vectors using directed evolution. As a postdoctoral researcher, he developed novel droplet-based technologies, notably allowing higher throughput and minimal sample volumes in biological screening assays.

His laboratory currently uses droplet-based approaches to address questions related to personalized medicine, biological screening assays, and genomics.[8] In the context of cancer therapy, this work has allowed cost-efficient screening of numerous drug combinations on tumor samples issued from patient biopsies, enabling rapid determination of personalized treatment regimens for cancer patients.[9]

His research yielded technologies improving the discovery of therapeutic antibodies.

Selected publications

[edit]
  • Clausell-Tormos, Jenifer; Lieber, Diana; Baret, Jean-Christophe; El-Harrak, Abdeslam; Miller, Oliver J.; Frenz, Lucas; Blouwolff, Joshua; Humphry, Katherine J.; Köster, Sarah; Duan, Honey; Holtze, Christian; Weitz, David A.; Griffiths, Andrew D.; Merten, Christoph A. (2008). "Droplet-Based Microfluidic Platforms for the Encapsulation and Screening of Mammalian Cells and Multicellular Organisms". Chemistry & Biology. 15 (5): 427–437. doi:10.1016/j.chembiol.2008.04.004. PMID 18482695.
  • Debs, B. E.; Utharala, R.; Balyasnikova, I. V.; Griffiths, A. D.; Merten, C. A. (2012). "Functional single-cell hybridoma screening using droplet-based microfluidics". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (29): 11570–11575. Bibcode:2012PNAS..10911570D. doi:10.1073/pnas.1204514109. PMC 3406880. PMID 22753519.
  • Chaipan, Chawaree; Pryszlak, Anna; Dean, Hansi; Poignard, Pascal; Benes, Vladimir; Griffiths, Andrew D.; Merten, Christoph A. (2017). "Single-Virus Droplet Microfluidics for High-Throughput Screening of Neutralizing Epitopes on HIV Particles". Cell Chemical Biology. 24 (6): 751–757.e3. doi:10.1016/j.chembiol.2017.05.009. PMID 28552581.
  • Shembekar, Nachiket; Hu, Hongxing; Eustace, David; Merten, Christoph A. (2018). "Single-Cell Droplet Microfluidic Screening for Antibodies Specifically Binding to Target Cells". Cell Reports. 22 (8): 2206–2215. doi:10.1016/j.celrep.2018.01.071. PMC 5842027. PMID 29466744.
  • Eduati, Federica; Utharala, Ramesh; Madhavan, Dharanija; Neumann, Ulf Peter; Longerich, Thomas; Cramer, Thorsten; Saez-Rodriguez, Julio; Merten, Christoph A. (2018). "A microfluidics platform for combinatorial drug screening on cancer biopsies". Nature Communications. 9 (1): 2434. Bibcode:2018NatCo...9.2434E. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04919-w. PMC 6015045. PMID 29934552.

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Christoph Merten". EPFL.
  2. ^ Biology, ©2022 MRC Laboratory of Molecular. "LMB Alumni List". MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  3. ^ Geneux, Valérie (7 September 2020). "Expert in Biomedical Microfluidics Joins EPFL". EPFL.
  4. ^ "Combi-seq: A leap forward for personalized cancer therapy". Medicalxpress.com.
  5. ^ "Nominations of Professors at the School of Engineering". EPFL. 26 September 2019.
  6. ^ "Members". EPFL.
  7. ^ "ADJUNCTS". Ludwig Cancer Research.
  8. ^ Geneux, Valérie (25 June 2020). "Christoph Merten Co-Awarded a Major SNSF Sinergia Grant". EPFL.
  9. ^ Mathur, L.; Szalai, B.; Du, N. H.; Utharala, R.; Ballinger, M.; Landry, J. J. M.; Ryckelynck, M.; Benes, V.; Saez-Rodriguez, J.; Merten, C. A. (1 August 2022). "Combi-seq for multiplexed transcriptome-based profiling of drug combinations using deterministic barcoding in single-cell droplets". Nature Communications. p. 4450. doi:10.1038/s41467-022-32197-0.
[edit]


Category:Living people Category:Goethe University Frankfurt alumni Category:Academic staff of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Category:German scientists Category:Engineers Category:Bioengineers