Prestigious DOC Fellowship awarded to Sofia Moysiadou
PhD student Sofia Moysiadou from the lab of Anna Obenauf has been awarded a prestigious DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The fellowship will support her research into why some cancer cells survive targeted therapy and how they eventually drive drug resistance in lung cancer.
The Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) has awarded one of its competitive DOC Fellowships to Sofia Moysiadou, PhD student in the lab of Anna Obenauf at the IMP. The fellowship will support her doctoral research on how cancer cells survive targeted therapies and eventually develop drug resistance. The DOC Fellowship Programme supports highly qualified doctoral candidates across all areas of basic research, enabling them to dedicate themselves fully to their PhD research within a defined timeframe.
Targeted therapies have transformed the treatment of many cancers, yet resistance remains a major clinical challenge.
In some patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), treatment with KRAS inhibitors initially eliminates most cancer cells, but a small number survives. These surviving cells can eventually give rise to tumours that no longer respond to therapy. In the Obenauf lab, Sofia Moysiadou investigates where these persister cells come from, how they evolve during treatment, and which molecular features enable their survival.
To answer these questions, Moysiadou uses CaTCHseq, a technology developed in the Obenauf lab that links a cell's molecular state before treatment to its fate after therapy. The approach allows researchers to identify the rare cells that survive KRAS inhibitor treatment, trace them back to their origins, and isolate them for detailed study. By revealing what enables these cells to persist, the work aims to identify vulnerabilities that could be exploited to prevent therapy resistance.
Before joining the IMP in April 2024, Moysiadou completed her bachelor’s degree in biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She went on to earn a master's degree in Cancer, Stem Cells and Developmental Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where she studied the function of colorectal cancer driver genes in the lab of Hugo Snippert at the University Medical Center Utrecht. As part of her master's training, she first joined the Obenauf lab as a Vienna BioCenter Summer School fellow before continuing with a research internship investigating the mechanisms of resistance to KRAS inhibitors.
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