User:Polac Harry/sandbox

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