Christian M. Schürch, MD, PhD

2021 Benjamin Castleman Award

Dr. Schürch completed his medical studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland in 2007. He concurrently conducted his MD thesis in neuro-infectiology in Dr. Stephen Leib’s laboratory at the Institute of Infectious Diseases. Subsequently, he performed a PhD thesis in tumor immunology and cancer stem cell biology in Dr. Adrian Ochsenbein’s laboratory at the Department of Biomedical Research. In 2012, he started his training in general surgical pathology at the Institute of Pathology in Bern with Dr. Aurel Perren and in 2015 moved to the University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany for a fellowship in hematopathology with Dr. Falko Fend and Dr. Leticia Quintanilla-Martinez. In 2016, Dr. Schürch performed a fellowship in cytology and in 2017 he obtained his board certificate for general surgical pathology. In 2017, he joined the Garry P. Nolan laboratory at Stanford University for a postdoctoral fellowship to study cancer immunology using highly multiplexed tissue imaging technologies. Dr. Schürch has published 44 peer-reviewed articles, 12 of them as first/corresponding author, and is co-inventor on 2 patents (1 issued, 1 pending). His current main focus of research is in tumor immunology, the tumor microenvironment, hematopathology and novel tissue imaging technologies. In particular, he is interested in how the immune system interacts with tumors, how this can be characterized in clinical samples using highly multiplexed tissue imaging and computational analysis, and how the spatial information of immune cell-tumor cell interactions can be used to predict cancer immunotherapy response.

Dr. Schürch has been the recipient of a Swiss National MD/ PhD Scholarship (2007), a Hagmann Foundation Postdoctoral Scholarship (2010), a Cloëtta Foundation Clinical Research Scholarship (2014), a Swiss National Science Foundation Advanced Postdoctoral Scholarship (2016), and a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Scholarship (2018). He is the recipient of numerous awards, including Best Ph.D. Thesis (2013), Hemmi Foundation Clinical Research Award (2013), Stowell-Orbison Certificate of Merit (2014), Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Young Investigator Award (2015), Pfizer Research Award (2017), Lady Tata International Leukemia Award (2017), and an ASH Abstract Achievement Award (2018). In 2020, Dr. Schürch was nominated to participate in the 2021 inaugural Arthur L. Irving Family Foundation Cancer Immunology Symposium.