Hosted by the School of Medicine at Cardiff University
Epigenetic cell states are not restricted to epigenome marks such as DNA methylation and histone modifications. Rather, it reflects the full spectrum of transcription regulation by which cells translate various inputs into sustainable changes of cell state. Notably, the epigenome not only reflects a cell’s current state, but also its developmental history (e.g., cell-of-origin in cancer) and its potential for future adaptation (e.g., plasticity in response to an immunological challenge).Our goal is to understand cells by dissecting their regulatory programs and reprogramming them based on a quantitative understanding of epigenetic cell states. We pursue three synergistic directions: To map and analyze cell states by multi-omics, single-cell, and spatial profiling (READ), to model regulatory circuitries with deep learning (LEARN), and to build artificial biological programs into cells by genome engineering (WRITE). We develop wet-lab and computational methods for all three directions and pursue initial applications for immunity and cancer.
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Christoph Bock is 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. His research combines experimental biology (high-throughput sequencing, epigenetics, CRISPR screening, bioengineering) with computational methods (bioinformatics, machine learning, artificial intelligence) – for immunology, cancer, and precision medicine. Christoph Bock is also a member of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee, fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and elected board member of the Young Academy in the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has received an ERC Starting Grant (2016-2021), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021-2026), the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (2009), the Overton Prize of the International Society for Computational Biology (2017), and the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022).