Franziska Schulze Bockeloh successfully defended her MSc thesis

Today, Franziska Schulze Bockeloh successfully defended her MSc thesis on developing on-chip immunostaining for the single-cell serial analysis of cancer stem cells, supported by Bruno Moerschbacher and the second referee, Prof. Burkhard Greve from the Klinik für Strahlentherapie – Radioonkologie of our Medical Faculty. Franziska worked in the research part of our first biotech start-up, EVORION Biotechnologies GmbH, under the direct guidance of Robert Weingarten, Hans Kleine-Brüggeney und Sebastian Bühren. Evorion is developing microfluidic chips for the parallel analysis of single cells growing in the 3D environment of hydrogel beads. This allows the individual analysis of cells in cell populations e.g. of a tumour which always contains different cell phenotypes, such as cancer stem cells that are responsible for its aggressiveness. Detailed characterisation of the cells - both for answering basic questions of e.g. tumour stem cell physiology and for advanced diagnosis of tumours from patients - requires the ability to immuno-stain the cells on the chip, e.g. to analyse signalling pathways. This is not at all a trivial task, to keep the isolated cells alive and happy so that the analyses yield meaningful results. Of course, no details will be revealed here - but she succeeded! And fortunately, her success came at just the right time when a large research proposal of Evorion has been granted, so that Franzi will continue her work in the company on this project. We are happy that thus, Franzi, you will be staying with us!