One of 47,000
Three questions for physicist Carsten Marr
Prof. Dr. Carsten Marr is Founding Director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich. Image: Falling Walls
Carsten Marr is a physicist, Founding Director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, and a Professor of AI in Hematology and Cell Therapy at the LMU Munich. Together with his team, he develops AI methods for medical diagnostics and biomedicine – from leukemia detection to predicting stem cell behavior.
What’s the most exciting thing about your job?
Seeing how an idea turns into a research project – how it manifests step by step and, in the best case, actually works. I can still remember the phone call with my doctoral student Moritz. I was on vacation in Hamburg, he was in Munich, and we came up with the idea of using single-cell sequencing data to systematically search for target antigens for CAR-T cell therapies in acute myeloid leukemia. Two years later – and after a great deal of in-depth work and countless experiments with our great partners at the LMU – the paper was published in Nature Biotechnology. It shows that AI-supported analyses can make a real contribution to the development of new cancer therapies.
If money and time were no object, what would your next project be?
For me, the question would have to be phrased differently – because time plays a very important part. My goal is to use AI models to significantly simplify and improve the work of clinicians and medical researchers. Doing so takes good ideas, courage, and money. But above all, it takes speed, so that the methods we develop actually reach patients.
If you could choose anyone, who would you like to have dinner with and what would you talk about?
y great-great-great-grandparents. I would be very interested to know where and how they lived in the mid-19th century – how they perceived and coped with the challenges of their time. And what decisions they made that ultimately led to me sitting here today.
Readers comments