Advanced Medical Biomarker Research

The Medical University of Graz and the FFG K1 center “CBmed” (Center for Biomarker Research in Medicine) provide a unique PhD Program “AMBRA“(Advanced medical biomarker research) for challenging interrelated research topics and a training program focusing on translational topics between medicine, health care and industry to highly talented and well educated students. The scientific concept includes all stages of strategic medical biomarker development ranging from the identification of new biomarkers to the validation and finally to translational research that will bring candidate biomarkers into clinical practice. AMBRA has a clear focus on the most common diseases that pose a major health threat to individuals and to the public such as cancer, metabolic, fertility and cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune as well as inflammatory, brain and ageing-related disorders.

Admitted PhD students receive funding for three years. Applicants must hold a Master´s degree or equivalent in Medicine, Chemistry or Life Sciences. English is the language used for teaching, communication and writing of the Thesis and thus, excellent English skills are required.

Scope

Medical biomarkers represent a highly relevant clinical topic that is recognized to enable a more personalized treatment of patients and a better allocation of health care resources. Medical biomarkers can serve as diagnostic, prognostic, predictive and pharmacodynamic tools in clinical practice to (1) diagnose a disease, (2) identify at-risk patients, (3) identify different stages/severities of a disease, (4) predict disease prognosis, (5) stratify patients for the best therapy, (6) identify responders/non-responders and (7) provide adequate monitoring tools. Medical biomarkers also play a promising role in pharmaceutical drug development to provide guidelines for the safe and effective use of targeted therapeutic drugs.

The ultimate goal of medical biomarker research is to close the gap between scientific knowledge and medical needs, and to accelerate the development of new prognostic and predictive biomarkers for personalized diagnostics and therapy. The scientific concept includes all stages of strategic medical biomarker development ranging from the identification of new biomarkers, to the validation of potential biomarkers and finally to translational research that can bring candidate biomarkers into clinical practice. Newly identified or validated biomarkers will:

improve early diagnosis, often before clinical manifestation,
allow identification of at-risk patients for new cost-effective prevention concepts,
facilitate personalized therapy and therapy monitoring, and
establish new diagnostic tests with high precision, fast analysis and low costs.

Formally, AMBRA is an interdisciplinary thesis program in accordance with §4 of the PhD program curriculum at the Medical University of Graz.