Anna Obenauf, PhD, is a senior group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna. Her laboratory aims to identify novel therapeutic approaches and mechanism-based therapy combinations for metastatic cancers, while gaining understanding of fundamental processes in biology. Recentwork includes the discovery that cancer cells impair monocyte-mediated intratumoral T cell stimulation to evade immunity (Elewaut et al, Nature, 2025), that acquired resistance to targeted therapy leads to cross-resistance to immunotherapy, despite their entirely different mode of action (Haas et al., Nature Cancer, 2021), or the identification of HPV42 as an oncogenic virus and the cause of a skin cancer (Leiendecker et al., Cancer Discovery, 2022). The lab also develops and applies new technologies, such as CaTCH (and recently CaTCHseq) which uncovered that resistance to targeted therapy is frequently acquired in persister cells (Umkehrer et al. 2020, Nature Biotechnology). 

Work in the Obenauf lab is currently funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, the Alex’s Lemonade stand Crazy 8 program, European Commission (ITN networks), the FWF Excellence Program, Viennese Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), SWISSBRIDGE Award. Her team’s contributions were recognized through several honors and awards, among them: Elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2019), EMBO YIP Program (2021), AAAS Martin and Rose Wachtel Cancer Research Award (2022), elected as a full EMBO member (2023) and several awards to her lab members.