Anna Obenauf
Anna Obenauf, PhD, is a group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna. She joined the IMP in 2016 after a postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with Joan Massagué. Her laboratory works at the interface between mechanistic biology and clinically relevant problems, with the goal to identify novel therapeutic approaches and rational therapeutic combinations for metastatic cancers.
Recent work includes the discovery that acquired resistance to targeted therapy leads to cross-resistance to immunotherapy, despite their entirely different mode of action (Haas et al., Nature Cancer, 2021), or that resistance to targeted therapy, including the resistance-conferring mutations and epi-genetic mutations are frequently acquired during therapy exposure (Umkehrer et al. 2020, Nature Biotechnology), and they have identified novel therapeutic approaches for rare cancers, such as Merkel cell carcinoma (Leiendecker et al., EMBO MM, 2020). Earlier work described the therapy-induced secretome as a novel driver of therapy resistance and tumor progression (Obenauf et al., 2015, Nature), and mediators of metastasis. To break new ground, a key effort in the Obenauf lab is to deploy and develop new technologies. They, for example, recently developed a functional lineage tracing approach termed CaTCH (CRISPRa tracing of clones in heterogeneous cell populations, Umkehrer et al. 2020, Nature Biotechnology), which allows to trace clones through evolutionary bottlenecks, but also allows to “go back in time” to retrospectively isolate founding clones from millions of cells prior to evolutionary selection. Thus, CaTCH has the potential to give unprecedented insights into tumor evolution.
Work in the Obenauf lab is funded by the WWTF, Alex’s Lemonade stand Crazy 8, as well as a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for her research project "Rational combination therapies for metastatic cancer (CombaTCancer)". In 2019, she was elected as a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and in 2021 she was selected as a member of the EMBO YIP Program.
Abstracts this author is presenting: