Affiliation: Saarland University, Center of Human and Molecular Biology, Biophysics Department

Janina Frisch (PhD) is a part of the Center of Human and Molecular Biology at the Biophysics Department of the Saarland University, Germany. From 2008 to 2011, she studied Applied Life Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences in Zweibruecken, Germany, where a guest research project at the Chinese University of Hong Kong was included. Thereafter, she attained her master’s degree in Biomedicine from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany (2011-2013). Her doctoral studies were performed from 2013 to 2016 at the Center of Experimental Orthopaedics, Saarland University Medical Center, Germany, wherein intensive research was done with rAAV vectors, to genetically modify stem cells and bone marrow aspirates for cartilage repair. Her thesis was awarded, and she also published several articles verifying the use of rAAV vectors to overexpress growth factors and to promote chondrogenic differentiation of progenitor cells. In her first postdoctoral phase, she continued working on rAAV vectors at the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Langen, Germany, where her research was focused on immunotherapy for cancer diseases, which involved the development of targeted rAAV vectors encoding for immune checkpoint inhibitors (2016-2018). At present, she is contributing to a Collaborative Research Center funded by the German Research Foundation by working on cardiovascular complications in chronic kidney disease. The laboratory is mainly performing redox research using a genetically encoded sensor with subcellular resolution in a broad application field. Establishing rAAV vector production and application is one of her main goals, along with inducing new and promising tools, to further increase the scope of research for the laboratory.