Raza Ali awarded €1.5 million European Research Council Starting Grant

Dr Raza Ali has been awarded a €1.5 million European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for his research on immunotherapy and the tumour microenvironment in breast cancer.

Immunotherapy has transformed the treatment of certain cancers, such as melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer, but its role in the treatment of breast cancer is still unclear. Clinical trials have shown that while some patients benefit from immunotherapy, others do not. The success of immunotherapy treatments can depend on the spatial organisation of the tumour microenvironment, but there are no reliable biomarkers to guide who will benefit and who won’t.

With this Starting Grant, the Ali Group will use advanced imaging techniques to understand the tumour microenvironment, using samples from thousands of breast cancer patients including those enrolled in immunotherapy trials. He will uncover how the tumour microenvironment determines response to immunotherapy, how immunotherapy can change the microenvironment to kill tumour cells and importantly, discover biomarkers to allow this to be translated into the clinic.

The ERC Starting Grants are part of the Horizon Europe programme, they help excellent younger scientists, who have up to 7 years’ experience after their PhDs, to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.

Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said: “We are proud that we are empowering younger researchers to follow their curiosity. These new ERC laureates bring a remarkable wealth of scientific ideas, they will certainly further our knowledge and some already have practical applications in sight. I wish them all the best of luck with their explorations.”

President of the European Research Council Prof. Maria Leptin said: “It is a pleasure to see this new group of bright minds at the start of their careers, set to take their research to new heights. I cannot emphasise enough that Europe as a whole – both at national and at EU level – has to continue to back and empower its promising talent. We must encourage young researchers who are led by sheer curiosity to go after their most ambitious scientific ideas. Investing in them and their frontier research is investing in our future.”

The starting grants will be invested in scientific projects spanning all disciplines of research from engineering to life sciences to humanities. Other grants applications funded include a cryptography engineer in Paris will be looking for better ways to secure digital resources; a professor in vaccinology in Netherlands will be developing effective vaccines for parasitic diseases like malaria; and a legal scholar in Czechia will study the role of courts in international refugee law.