Vacancy: PhD candidate or Postdoctoral fellow in Perturbational Systems Oncology (CRIG - UGent - VIB)


The VIB-Center for Inflammation Research is seeking for a PhD candidate for a research project in the Guilliams and Saelens teams.
 

In this research project you will apply in vivo CRISPR screens to study the functional specialization of macrophages during liver metastasis. This project is supported by a Foundation against Cancer (2025 – 2030). We have developed in vivo single-cell CRISPR technologies to screen for dozens of molecular factors in tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) in vivo. We will apply these technologies to unravel the causal circuits driving the development and the functional specialisation of the immunosuppressive TAMs. We will focus on the crosstalk between cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) and TAMs and will study the effect of macrophage perturbations on the neighbouring stromal cells and vice versa. These technologies are a game-changer in the speed, scale and resolution in which in vivo pathways of macrophage activation and the cross-talk with the cells representing their niche can be unravelled. This will allow to decode the causal circuits controlling TAM and CAF reprogramming at unprecedented speed through iterative CRISPR screens.