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Christoph Merten is a German bio-engineer and entrepreneur; currently Associate Professor at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). He is an adjunct scientist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne. His research focuses on developing biomedical microfluidics technologies for drug discovery, diagnostics, and personalized therapy in cancer research.

Early life and education
Merten was born in Bielefeld and graduated in 1999 with a diploma in biochemistry from the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he also studied organic chemistry until his intermediate degree (Vordiplom). He then pursued a Ph.D. at the Paul Ehrlich Institute, where he worked on the directed evolution of retroviral vectors, graduating in 2004. He then moved to the University of Cambridge, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Medical Research Council Laboratory for Molecular Biology, focusing on high-throughput screening using emulsion technologies.

Career
In 2005, he started a second postdoctoral appointment at the Institut de science et d'ingénierie supramoléculaires (ISIS) in Strasbourg, France. He focused on droplet-based microfluidics for cellular assays and started his research group in 2007. From 2010 to 2019, he served as a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, where he established high-throughput droplet-based microfluidic screening platforms.

In 2019, he was named associate professor of bioengineering at EPFL and currently leads the laboratory for biomedical microfluidics (LBMM) within the School of Engineering. He also holds an adjunct scientist position at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research's Lausanne branch.

Research
During his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Christian Buchholz at the Paul Ehrlich Institute, Merten's research focused on developing gene therapy vectors using directed evolution. As a postdoctoral researcher, he developed novel droplet-based technologies, notably allowing higher throughput and minimal sample volumes in biological screening assays.

His laboratory currently uses droplet-based approaches to address questions related to personalized medicine, biological screening assays, and genomics. In the context of cancer therapy, this work has allowed cost-efficient screening of numerous drug combinations on tumor samples issued from patient biopsies, enabling rapid determination of personalized treatment regimens for cancer patients.

His research yielded technologies improving the discovery of therapeutic antibodies.