Christoph A Merten

Christoph Merten (born 1976) is a German bio-engineer and entrepreneur; currently professor at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). He is an adjunct scientist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne. His research focuses on developing biomedical microfluidics technologies for drug discovery, diagnostics, and personalized therapy in cancer research.

Career

Christoph studied biochemistry and organic chemistry at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He did his PhD at the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Langen, Germany before having a first postdoctoral research position at the Medical Research Council, Laboratory for Molecular Biology, in Cambridge, UK.

In 2005, he started a second postdoctoral appointment at the Institut de science et d'ingénierie supramoléculaires (ISIS) in Strasbourg, France. He focused on droplet-based microfluidics for cellular assays and started his research group in 2007. From 2010 to 2019, he served as a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, where he established high-throughput droplet-based microfluidic screening platforms.

In 2019, he was named associate professor of bioengineering at EPFL and currently leads the laboratory for biomedical microfluidics (LBMM) within the School of Engineering. He also holds an adjunct scientist position at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research's Lausanne branch.

Entrepreneurship In 2017 he became the scientific founder of Velabs Therapeutics, a microfluidic antibody discovery company now operating as Veraxa Biotech. He is also leading the TheraMe! consortium, developing microfluidic technologies for personalized cancer treatment. This work resulted in the foundation of the EPFL-based Startup TheraMe! in 2023.

Research His laboratory currently uses droplet-based approaches to address questions related to personalized medicine, biological screening assays, and genomics. In the context of cancer therapy, this work has allowed cost-efficient screening of numerous drug combinations on tumor samples issued from patient biopsies, enabling rapid determination of personalized treatment regimens for cancer patients.

Selected publications