Anais Elewaut wins Egon Macher Award
Anais Elewaut, recent PhD graduate from Anna Obenauf’s lab at the IMP, has been honoured with the Egon Macher Award by the German dermatological research association, ADF. The award recognises Elewaut’s research on how cancer evades the immune system.
Recent PhD graduate Anais Elewaut was awarded the Egon Macher Award for young researchers by the German dermatological research association, ADF (“Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dermatologische Forschung”, ADF) in recognition of her research on immune evasion in cancer. Elewaut joined Anna Obenauf’s lab as a student of the Vienna BioCenter PhD Program and recently completed her doctoral studies.
Her work, published in the paper “Cancer cells impair monocyte-mediated T cell stimulation to evade immunity”, was honoured for its contributions to understanding how tumours escape immune responses. Elewaut and co-author Guillem Estivill discovered the crucial role of a type of immune cell—inflammatory monocytes—in reactivating cancer-killing T cells within tumours, following an initial activation in the lymph nodes. The findings, published in the journal Nature, make monocytes a promising target to boost immunotherapies, potentially benefitting patients affected by a range of cancers, including melanoma, lung, pancreatic, and colorectal cancer.
Before joining the IMP, Elewaut completed her bachelor’s and master’s in biochemistry and biotechnology at Ghent University, Belgium, specialising in biomedical biotechnology. For her master’s thesis, she conducted research at the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas Margarita Salas (CSIC), focusing on mechanisms that drive brain tumour growth. In 2018, she joined Anna Obenauf’s lab to investigate the mechanisms of cross-resistance to targeted and immunotherapies, aiming to better understand how cancer cells evade treatment.
About the Egon Macher Award
The Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dermatologische Forschung (ADF) is a research association dedicated to dermatology. The association annually awards the Egon Macher Award for young scientists since 2003 to promote scientific work in the field of dermatology. The prize is dedicated to outstanding scientific work in experimental dermatology by a young researcher.
About the Vienna BioCenter PhD Program
Anais Elewaut was a doctoral student of the Vienna BioCenter PhD Program. Are you interested in a world-class career in molecular biology? Find out more: https://training.vbc.ac.at/phd-program/
Further reading