(Vienna, 03.05.2024) Eleni Tomazou took over the §99-(5) tenure-track assistant professorship of sarcoma biology at the Medical University of Vienna at the beginning of May. Tomazou has headed a research group for pediatric sarcomas at the St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute (CCRI) since 2018. She was awarded the highly competitive ERC Consolidator Grant just last year.
Eleni Tomazou's field of research is of great importance for pediatric cancer research: sarcomas are malignant tumors that affect bones and soft tissue. They form an extremely heterogeneous group and are among the least understood types of cancer to date, with little therapeutic progress. 20 percent of childhood cancers are sarcomas. They have few mutations but carry epigenetic changes that reflect their embryonic origin. This underlines the potential role of epigenetics and developmental biology in the study of these cancers and the development of precision therapies. Driven by her expertise in molecular biology, Eleni Tomazou is working towards a future where pediatric sarcomas can be diagnosed and treated based on a comprehensive molecular understanding.
About Eleni Tomazou:
Eleni Tomazou graduated in Molecular Biology from the University of Glasgow (Scotland, UK). She received her PhD from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge (England, UK) and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Broad Institute and the Harvard Department for Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA) and in molecular diagnostics at the American Red Cross HLA Typing Center (Massachusetts, USA). She received prestigious grants from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), including the Lise Meitner and Elise Richter Fellowships, and established an independent research group at St. Anna Children's Cancer Research CCRI in 2018. In 2023, she was awarded a highly competitive ERC Consolidator Grant to pursue an ambitious project to establish and utilize a new type of sarcoma disease model based on human pluripotent stem cells.