Group Florian Bock
Florian Bock is an assistant professor and group leader at the Department of Radiotherapy.
During his PhD at the Institute for Developmental Immunology, Medical University Innsbruck in Austria, he was working on the role of DNA damage in cell survival, NF-kB activation and inflammation. He did postdoctoral research at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, investigating how post-transcriptional gene regulation can impact on apoptosis. For his second postdoc, he worked at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute on how apoptosis can influence surrounding cells and promote paracrine resistance to cell death.
He previously received funding from Krebshilfe Tirol (2009 – 2013), Tiroler Wissenschaftsfond (2012) and Tenovus Scotland (2017), as well as an award for the best PhD thesis. His research at MIT was funded by a Ludwig postdoctoral fellowship.
In his current research, he aims to broadly understand the role of RNA regulation in health and disease. Using cell death and senescence as paradigms, he investigates transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene regulation and the influence they can exert on inflammation, the microenvironment and cell fate. Being able to modulate this response has the potential to improve not only cancer therapy, but also other diseases characterized by increased inflammation as well as aging.