Source: European Investment Bank
Professor Marek Mráz’s research group aims to understand why treatment is less effective for some types of leukaemia and for some patients. After conducting research in the United States, he returned to his native Czechia and the university where he had studied as an undergraduate, because of the facilities offered by the Central European Institute of Technology, part of the Bohunice campus.
“Thanks to new models that mimic the environment of lymph nodes, we can test new drugs and their combinations more quickly and precisely,” says Mráz, who has secured prestigious European Research Council grants to support his work. “Some of our discoveries have already led to patents and are opening the way to the development of new therapeutic approaches.”
The high-tech campus, which opened in 2011 with the financial backing of the European Union, is important because its advanced infrastructure keeps young researchers like Mráz in Europe, functions as an incubator for companies spun off from scientific research conducted there, and allows teams from different fields of research to cooperate on new ideas and approaches together – for Mráz a key aspect of modern science.
“The combination of state-of-the-art infrastructure, basic research and close cooperation with clinical departments – in my case, specifically with the Department of Internal Medicine, Haematology and Oncology at University Hospital Brno – is absolutely essential for us,” says Mráz. “It allows us to obtain samples from patients and to keep pace with medical reality and the ways in which patients with the diseases we study are treated.”