New Faculty Appointment: Dr. Berend Snijder Joins the BIIE

The Botnar Institute of Immune Engineering (BIIE) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Berend Snijder as its newest faculty member. Reflective of his many achievements, Dr. Snijder joins the BIIE as a Faculty Professor and Research Group Leader.

Dr. Snijder is also a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the Comprehensive Cancer Center Zurich. He previously served as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zurich.

Dr. Snijder's research has made significant contributions to our understanding of systems immunology and systems oncology through the development of a novel, image-based approach for functional profiling called Pharmacoscopy. This approach focuses on the systematic functional and multi-omic profiling of human tissues in health and disease, by combining multiplexed staining, automated microscopy and single-cell image analysis with methods in machine and deep learning, all with an emphasis on clinical/translational impact. Dr. Snijder is a leading figure in the field of functional precision medicine, with recent publications in prestigious journals including Science, Nature, and Nature Medicine. Some of Dr. Snijder’s recent work has revealed crucial insights into the physical wiring of the human immune system as well as the role of cellular architecture in T cell responses.

His translation-enabling research and entrepreneurial vision have led to the co-founding of three spinoff companies: Allcyte (acquired by Exscientia, now Recursion), Prevision Medicine, and Graph Therapeutics.

Q&A with Dr. Snijder

What attracted you to join the Botnar Institute of Immune Engineering?
How well the vision aligns with our own. We have been working over a decade on translating our systems immunology and oncology efforts into patient benefit, culminating in clinical trials based on Pharmacoscopy, and the discovery of vortioxetine as repurposable treatment for glioblastoma, among others. Joining the BIIE will now allow us to combine our translational systems research expertise with that of excellent like-minded colleagues, and, together, pursue the bold vision of improving child and adolescent health globally through immune engineering. 

As the first faculty member at BIIE, what vision do you have for building and developing your research group?
I have been blessed with absolutely amazing team members, and look forward to evolving this group into a professional and dynamic research team with a long-term perspective. We will deepen our current core expertise and technologies, and greatly expand our ability to modulate and profile the human immune system at scale in health and disease. All with the goal to develop a deeper understanding of, and better treatments for, inflammation and immune-mediated diseases among others.

Your recent publications show strong collaborative work across different fields. How do you see yourself fostering interdisciplinary research at BIIE?
Within the BIIE, we will set up the lab to directly synergize with the engineering efforts of our colleagues, bringing clinically-relevant functional tissue profiling technologies to the mix. We will furthermore continue to build our science on strong clinical partnerships, to better understand human immune variability, ensure the clinical relevance of our research findings, and enable direct translation into patient benefit.

How do you foresee the evolution of your work to positively impact the health of children and adolescents across the globe?
There is a lot of room to improve the way we treat diseases, and to do so equitably across the globe. I hope our contribution to immune engineering of better treatment solutions will be a key step in that process. Among others, we will work to develop precision immunology, by generating a better understanding of the functional and phenotypic immune variability present among children and adolescents around the world, and use that understanding to help clinicians make better treatment decisions with better therapies. 

In the big picture, though, the beauty of scientific progress is that it is intrinsically unpredictable; we do not know the breakthroughs awaiting us. However, what we can do is to be prepared, work hard, have fun, keep our eye on the goal, surround ourselves with excellent colleagues, and together dream big.