The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the results of the 2025 Advanced Grant round. These grants are among the most prestigious European programmes for established researchers and support scientifically ambitious, high-risk projects with potentially far-reaching significance. Across Europe, 319 researchers are receiving funding totalling 838 million euros.
Christoph Bock, Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Centre for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Professor of Medical Informatics at MedUni Vienna, is receiving funding for his project, based at CeMM, to develop a new strategy for cancer immunotherapy.
His ‘Solid-CART’ project aims to develop a new generation of CAR-T cells for the treatment of solid tumours. CAR-T cell therapies have already proven effective against certain blood cancers, but have so far proved significantly more difficult to apply to solid tumours. Using AI-supported methods and CRISPR-based screens, the aim is to programme CAR-T cells so that they recognise tumour tissue more specifically and spare healthy cells as much as possible. The focus is on HER2-positive forms of lung, breast and bowel cancer.