ERC Starting Grants: Jakob Kather awarded

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the award of 400 Starting Grants to young scientists throughout Europe. Jakob Kather, who also works at the NCT Heidelberg, is one of the recipients who will receive 1.5 million euros each for their research from 2024 to 2028.

The ERC Starting Grants are intended to help researchers at the beginning of their careers to start their own projects, form teams and thus pursue their ideas further. In total, ERC Starting Grants support cutting-edge research in all fields, from medicine and physics to social sciences and the humanities, amounting to €628 million. For the current round of competition, 2,696 proposals were submitted. Just under 15 percent of the proposals were awarded a grant.

The successful applicants will carry out their projects at universities and research centers in 24 European countries. One of them is Jakob Kather, Professor at the Chair of Clinical Artificial Intelligence at the Else Kröner Fresenius Center for Digital Health Technische Universität Dresden and member of the Medical Oncology Department at the NCT Heidelberg. In the NADIR project (New directions for deep learning in cancer research through concept explainability and virtual experimentation), Jakob Kather is exploring ways to use artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning for cancer research. He explains, "The ERC funding will allow me to combine translational cancer research with computational pathology. By combining clinical and technical methods, we will develop a new approach to understanding tumors, thus enabling new therapeutic strategies."

With the help of artificial neural networks, patterns and structures can be extracted from images of tissue samples to make predictions about genetic characteristics and response to tumor therapies. The NADIR project will integrate additional clinical patient data and biological knowledge in the deep learning process. NADIR aims to serve as a tool for cancer research, focusing in particular on the interaction between tumor and immune system in certain types of cancer.

Jakob Kather is a specialist in internal medicine and interdisciplinary scientist. Among other things, he conducts research on AI-based biomarkers for personalized tumor immunotherapy at the NCT Heidelberg in the research group of Dirk Jäger, Managing Director at the NCT Heidelberg and Head of Medical Oncology. Thanks to the ERC Starting Grant, which supports the further development of the technical basis for such AI systems, clinical research at the NCT Heidelberg is also being funded.