Eva Chrenková established advanced ex vivo tissue culture protocols and developed expertise in high-dimensional flow cytometry, enabling deep profiling of tumor phenotypes.
In her postdoctoral work in the Winkler lab, Eva will focus her efforts on a better understanding of metastasis, which remains the primary cause of cancer mortality. Recent studies highlight epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity (EMP)—a dynamic spectrum of tumor cell states—as a central mechanism of tumor dissemination and metastatic outgrowth. The project builds on work from Juliane Winkler, who recently showed that EMP state composition correlates with metastatic potential (Winkler et al., JCI, 2024). Eva will now explore how EMP states interact, evolve, and shape the tumor microenvironment using novel spatial and single-cell omics technologies. Her research aims to uncover fundamental principles of the biology of metastasis that may reveal novel therapeutic targets to interfere with metastatic progression.