EU funding for research in astrophysics and cancer immunotherapy

ERC Advanced Grants awarded to Prof. Suyu and Prof. Saur

Immunotherapies are considered a major hope in the fight against cancer. However, their success in pancreatic cancer has so far been limited. These tumors actively suppress the body’s immune response within their immediate environment. This is where Prof. Dieter Saur’s Evoke‑PDAC project comes in. Its initial goal is to better understand how different tumor subtypes create and exploit these protective “niches.”

To achieve this, the team is developing innovative models and methods that, for the first time, allow researchers to track—both spatially and over time—how immune cells act or become inhibited within the tumor. In a next step, new approaches will be developed to ensure that immune cells effectively attack the tumor and remain active over the long term. The results could significantly improve survival prospects for patients with this particularly aggressive form of cancer.

Dieter Saur is a DKTK Professor of Translational Cancer Research at the TUM School of Medicine and Health. His research has been supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant. Together with Prof. Roland Rad, he received the German Cancer Prize for Experimental Research in 2019.

How fast is our universe expanding? This question is one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in physics - and intriguingly, measurements from different methods keep giving conflicting answers. In her LENS-ON-FIRE project, Prof. Sherry Suyu wants to resolve this tension by using a spectacular trick of nature: gravitational lensing. When a galaxy sits between us and a distant supernova, the galaxy's gravity acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, splitting the light into multiple images that arrive at slightly different times. By precisely measuring these time delays, Prof. Suyu can determine the expansion rate of the universe with unprecedented accuracy - down to 1%. But LENS-ON-FIRE goes even further: the same time-delay trick allows scientists to "preview" an upcoming supernova and then watch its earliest moments unfold in full detail - something never done before. This will finally shed light on a long-standing mystery about what actually triggers these giant stellar explosions of white dwarfs. The project will also use lensing to directly measure the size of bright flares caused by stars being torn apart near supermassive black holes.

Astrophysicist Sherry Suyu is Professor of Observational Cosmology at the TUM School of Natural Sciences and Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. Her research was already funded with an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2017.