Our congratulations to Ludwig Lausanne’s Michal Bassani-Sternberg and Camilla Jandus, who were named winners of this year’s Robert Wenner Prize, which was awarded for the first time to two scientists. Issued by the Swiss Cancer League and established by a bequest left by the eponymous Basel gynecologist, who died in 1979, the award honors outstanding young scientists in the field of oncology. They each received a 50,000 Swiss franc grant to support their research. Michal is a pioneer in the field of immunopeptidomics—the integrated use of mass spectrometry and computational analysis, including machine learning, to predict which antigens out of the thousands displayed to the immune system’s T cells are most likely to provoke effective immune responses. Aside from its contributions to our understanding of the rules that govern antigen presentation and recognition, her work is already being applied to design personalized cancer vaccines. Camilla’s research focuses on the therapeutic potential of innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) and helper T cells. Her lab is exploring changes to ILCs in cancer patients and examining their crosstalk with immune and cancer cells. Her team has also developed innovative technologies to examine tumor-specific CD4+ T cells and their receptors, revealing that, beyond their helper functions, these cells can directly kill cancer cells, a capacity that could potentially be exploited for cancer immunotherapy.
Back to September 2026 Ludwig Link