With great pleasure, we present the PhD Student of the Month for July 2021, Ariane Steindl. She is enrolled in the N790 programme „Clinical Neuroscience“ (CLINS) and works at the Division of Oncology, Department of Medicine I.
Her doctoral thesis focuses on immunological and clinical characteristics of brain metastases form different solid tumors. As precise prognostic assessment presents an important foundation for treatment decisions and clinical trial planning, Ariane is going to evaluate applicability of prognostic scores and further potential prognostic factors in a large, real-life, single center population of more than 6.000 patients with brain metastasis. Furthermore, given the recently discovered high clinical benefit of personalized medicine and immunotherapy, a deeper insight into inflammatory processes by analyzing tumor infiltrating lymphocytes and the tumor mutational burden by immunostaining and whole-genome sequencing in brain metastatic tissue will contribute to an important gain of biological knowledge. This is necessary in order to develop new treatment strategies in patients suffering from brain metastatic cancer.
Ariane’s research efforts have already led to numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, amongst these first-author publications in „Journal of Neuro-Oncology“, „Journal of Clinical Medicine“, „ESMO Open“ and the top-ranked journal „Cancer“.