More great news from the consortium! Michal Bassani-Sternberg, Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne and one of the fifteen ORFeus principal investigators, has been awarded the Robert Wenner Prize 2026 by the Swiss Cancer League, one of Switzerland’s most prestigious distinctions for young researchers in oncology.
Michal was recognized for her pioneering work in personalized cancer immunotherapy. Her lab develops mass-spectrometry-based approaches to identify the peptides that tumor cells display on their surface for the immune system to inspect, a technique called immunopeptidomics. Her group’s NeoDisc pipeline for personalized neoantigen identification is already used in clinical vaccine trials, and recent work combines these methods with AI to improve cancer vaccine design.
This expertise is central to ORFeus. Michal supervises DC15, which investigates how low-abundance cryptic peptides from the dark proteome compete for presentation on cancer cells in melanoma, and co-supervises DC14 on CRISPR-based discovery of antigen presentation regulators. Her work represents the translational end of the ORFeus pipeline: the point where hidden proteins become candidate targets for therapy.
Congratulations, Michal!