PRINCIPAL
INVESTIGATORS
Principal Investigator
Christoph Bock
Background
I am 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. Before moving to Vienna in 2012, I 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).
I serve as scientific coordinator of CeMM’s Biomedical Sequencing Facility. Furthermore, I am a member of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee, a fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and an elected EMBO board member. My awards include the Otto Hahn Medal (2009), ERC Starting (2016–2021) and Consolidator (2021–2026) Grants, the Overton Prize (2017), and the Erwin Schrödinger Award (2022). Since 2019 I have been listed among the “Highly Cited Researchers” (Clarivate/ISI). I also co-founded Myllia Biotechnology, a Vienna-based startup developing single-cell methods for high-throughput biology and drug discovery.
Research
We are a team of wet-lab and computational researchers who combine experimental immunology and cancer biology with bioinformatics and machine learning, epigenetics and bioengineering, and a strong focus on technology development – with a translational angle and in collaboration with clinical researchers.
Our goal is to advance the understanding and treatment of human diseases through innovative experimental and computational methods in areas such as cancer and immunology. We work along five main directions:
- Single-cell biology. We use single-cell and spatial sequencing to dissect the function of epigenetic cell states in tissue homeostasis and pathogenesis.
- Biotechnology. We develop and apply innovative methods in the areas of single-cell sequencing, CRISPR screening, epigenome editing, and synthetic biology.
- Bioinformatics. We develop algorithms and software for large-scale data analysis, and we pursue clinical collaborations to establish medical impact.
- Machine learning. We develop methods for interpretable deep learning and artificial intelligence in biomedicine.
- Cell therapy. We use high-throughput technology to design synthetic immune cells as therapeutics.
Publications
Datlinger, P., Pankevich, E. V., Arnold, C. D., Pranckevicius, N., Lin, J., Romanovskaia, D., Schaefer, M., Piras, F., Orts, A. C., Nemc, A., Biesaga, P. N., Chan, M., Neuwirth, T., Artemov, A. V., Li, W., Ladstätter, S., Krausgruber, T., & Bock, C. (2025). Systematic discovery of CRISPR-boosted CAR T cell immunotherapies. Nature, 10.1038/s41586-025-09507-9. Advance online publication.
Fortelny, N., Farlik, M., Fife, V., Gorki, A. D., Lassnig, C., Maurer, B., Meissl, K., Dolezal, M., Boccuni, L., Ravi Sundar Jose Geetha, A., Akagha, M. J., Karjalainen, A., Shoebridge, S., Farhat, A., Mann, U., Jain, R., Tikoo, S., Zila, N., Esser-Skala, W., Krausgruber, T., … Bock, C. (2024). JAK-STAT signaling maintains homeostasis in T cells and macrophages. Nature immunology, 25(5), 847–859.
Moorlag, S. J. C. F. M., Folkman, L., Ter Horst, R., Krausgruber, T., Barreca, D., Schuster, L. C., Fife, V., Matzaraki, V., Li, W., Reichl, S., Mourits, V. P., Koeken, V. A. C. M., de Bree, L. C. J., Dijkstra, H., Lemmers, H., van Cranenbroek, B., van Rijssen, E., Koenen, H. J. P. M., Joosten, I., Xu, C. J., … Bock, C. (2024). Multi-omics analysis of innate and adaptive responses to BCG vaccination reveals epigenetic cell states that predict trained immunity. Immunity, 57(1), 171–187.e14.
Krausgruber, T., Fortelny, N., Fife-Gernedl, V., Senekowitsch, M., Schuster, L. C., Lercher, A., Nemc, A., Schmidl, C., Rendeiro, A. F., Bergthaler, A., & Bock, C. (2020). Structural cells are key regulators of organ-specific immune responses. Nature, 583(7815), 296–302.
Datlinger, P., Rendeiro, A. F., Schmidl, C., Krausgruber, T., Traxler, P., Klughammer, J., Schuster, L. C., Kuchler, A., Alpar, D., & Bock, C. (2017). Pooled CRISPR screening with single-cell transcriptome readout. Nature methods, 14(3), 297–301.