EJI Ita Askonas Prize for Anna Obenauf
Anna Obenauf, Senior Group Leader at the IMP, is awarded the EJI Ita Askonas Prize 2025 for her pioneering work uncovering how cancer evolution, therapy resistance, and immune evasion are intertwined.
Anna Obenauf, IMP Senior Group Leader, is awarded the EJI Ita Askonas Prize 2025. The prize was established in 2009 by the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS) and the European Journal of Immunology (EJI). The award seeks to celebrate early career female group leaders whose research relates to immunology.
Anna Obenauf and her lab study how tumours evolve under therapeutic pressure and interact with the immune system. Obenauf’s research focuses on the dynamic interplay between cancer cells and the tumour microenvironment, particularly how targeted and immune-based treatments shape tumour evolution, drive resistance, and alter immune surveillance. Obenauf has shown that resistance mechanisms to targeted therapies often simultaneously foster immune evasion, thereby limiting the success of immunotherapies. Her lab’s discovery that MAPK-inhibitor resistance can directly induce resistance to immune-based treatments—by reprogramming cancer-cell signalling and the surrounding tumour microenvironment—provided crucial mechanistic insights that informed clinical decision making.
A central theme of her work is unravelling how effective anti-tumour immunity is generated or suppressed within tumours. In a 2025 publication in the journal Nature, scientists from the Obenauf lab systematically mapped immune-permissive and immune-evasive tumour microenvironments in experimental models and patient samples. They revealed that activated T cells must be locally restimulated by myeloid cells within inflammatory niches to achieve full effector function. Unexpectedly, the scientists identified inflammatory monocytes—previously underappreciated but abundant in tumours—as key contributors to this process. These cells can “cross-dress” by acquiring and presenting peptide–MHC class I complexes from tumour cells, enabling robust intratumoural T-cell activation. By dissecting the molecular and cellular hierarchies governing these interactions, her group outlined how cancer cells can sculpt immune-evasive environments and proposed rational combination strategies to restore immune control.
Beyond mechanistic discoveries, Obenauf’s lab develops innovative technologies to study tumour evolution. Notably, they created CaTCH, a CRISPR-based lineage-tracing tool that enables the tracking and isolation of individual clones before and during therapy. Using this approach, her team demonstrated that resistance to targeted therapies frequently arises during treatment rather than from pre-existing resistant clones. Other lines of enquiry in the Obenauf lab include rare and understudied cancers such as Merkel Cell Carcinoma or paediatric osteosarcoma.
Until 2021, the EJI Ita Askonas Prize was awarded every three years. Since 2023, the prize has been awarded annually and is coordinated by the EFIS Task Force on Gender and Diversity, which reviews nomination packages and decides on the awardee. The prize consists of a 20,000 Euro award and is presented in the frame of an award ceremony at the annual European Congress of Immunology. Principal Investigators who have run an independent laboratory for a minimum of four and no more than ten years are eligible for nominations.
About Anna Obenauf
Anna Obenauf studied molecular biology at the University of Graz and completed her PhD in molecular medicine at the Medical University of Graz. She was a postdoctoral researcher in Joan Massagué's lab at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center from 2010, before establishing her own research group at the IMP in 2016. In 2022, she was promoted to the position of Senior Group Leader at the IMP.
Anna Obenauf has received distinguished awards and honours. These include two ERC Grants (Starting 2018, Consolidator 2024); the AAAS Wachtel Cancer Research Award (2022); Swiss Bridge Award (2023); and most recently the Dr. Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award (2025).
Anna Obenauf was elected to the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2019); became an EMBO Young Investigator (2021); and is elected full EMBO member (2023).
Further reading
Obenauf lab