Securing Host Immunity: Elimination versus Destruction

The immune system protects our body from external (pathogens) and internal (cancer) threats. The elimination of these threats or a misguided attack on the body`s own structures inevitably leads to tissue damage. Therefore, ensuring tissue integrity is of utmost importance in preventing autoimmune diseases, infections, and cancer. SHIELD is a unique doctoral program that explicitly focuses on these fundamental aspects of (host) immunity. It is necessary to integrate basic research, data science, and clinical science to enable students to explore fundamental biomedical questions regarding the protective shield of our immune system at this interface. SHIELD will train researchers for future precision medicine approaches, and the insights from this research prog ram are a prerequisite for improved therapies. To comprehensively address today`s medically relevant questions, interdisciplinary collaboration among various scientific disciplines is required. Eleven PhD projects will focus on the protective shield of our immune system and address three different yet interconnected research themes: 1. Elimination of pathogens and tumors; 2. Cellular and molecular immunity; 3. Tissue destruction triggered by autoimmune processes. This will explore better precision medicine approaches to significantly improve future therapies. The faculty consists of a balanced combination of experienced researchers, mid-career researchers, and early- career researchers. The wide range of complementary expertise that the groups share collectively and the close collaboration among the individual PhD projects benefit the students while ensuring high-quality research and education. SHIELD is embedded within the successful PhD program "Inflammation and Immunity" (IAI) at the Medical University of Vienna. IAI has been pioneering in linking cancer research and immunology, introducing competitive PhD recruitment, and has served as a model for many PhD programs in Austria since its inception in 2007. SHIELD expands the IAI`s PhD program to include a previously unexplored, complex, interdisciplinary research theme on host immunity and tissue destruction in the context of significant and contemporary translational research approaches, including modern data science. Furthermore, the program will pave the way for a unique MD/PhD career model in Austria, enabling the implementation of basic research and data science methods into clinical practice. The aim is to train translational scientists to enable and promote precision medicine approaches necessary to address the challenging medical problems of our time and the near future.