(Vienna, 05 September 2024) Conrad Merkle, principal investigator at MedUni Vienna’s Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, has been awarded a “Starting Grant” from the European Research Council (ERC) with funding of €1.5 million over five years for his project “Total Optical Coherence Characterization for Automated Tumor Analysis” or TOCCATA. The TOCCATA project aims to develop new medical imaging technology to better characterize tumor tissue samples with the goal of improving personalized medicine.
In the field of personalized medicine, different treatment options can be tested on cells cultured from a patient’s own tumor samples, however there are known differences between treatment effectiveness in vivo and in vitro. More advanced cell culturing methods that grow cells in a 3D structure can better mimic tumor tissue, but variability in treatment response remains a challenge. By robustly characterizing 3D cultured tissue, Conrad Merkle and his collaborators, Walter Berger from the Center for Cancer Research and Georg Widhalm from the Department of Neurosurgery, hope to identify the cells that best match the original tumor tissue for better selection of treatment candidates to reduce the risk of drug resistance.
“The approach that we want to investigate combines several different optical imaging methods and addresses their weaknesses to create a unique platform for obtaining detailed tissue information from small tissue samples,” explains Conrad Merkle. “I believe that the TOCCATA imaging platform will help us to better predict treatment efficacy in vitro and could one day lead to improved patient outcomes.”
About the Person
Conrad Merkle studied Bioengineering at University of Maryland, College Park and completed his PhD in Biomedical Engineering with a designated emphasis in Biophotonics and Bioimaging at University of California, Davis in 2018. Following his PhD, he joined the group of Bernhard Baumann at the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at MedUni Vienna as a postdoc. Since starting an FWF Standalone Project in November 2022, he has been leading his own research team at the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at MedUni Vienna as a principal investigator.