2026 – Daniel Kirschenbaum

Dr. Daniel Kirschenbaum is the winner of the 2026 EACR – Mark Foundation – Pezcoller Foundation Rising Star Award, with the project “Paving the way to VideoTranscriptomics: Benchmarking spatial transcriptomics and building image alignment for spatiotemporal glioblastoma immune mapping“.

Daniel Kirschenbaum developed the experimental method ‘Zman-seq’ to study immune responses in the organism with extreme precision. He and his colleagues were able to reconstruct, for the first time, the temporal sequence of the immune response in glioblastoma, one of the most common and aggressive types of brain cancer.

Within just 24 hours of entering the tumour tissue, natural killer (NK) cells lose their ability to kill tumour cells. At the same time, immune cells transform into tumour-associated macrophages (TAMs), which actively support tumour growth. However, by blocking an important immune receptor, the researchers were able to reverse this process, causing the immune cells to develop into pro-inflammatory macrophages capable of controlling tumours. The result provides an important new approach for further research aimed at promoting the development of targeted immunotherapies.

WHO IS DANIEL KIRSCHENBAUM?

Dr. Kirschebaum was born in Budapest, where he graduated in medicine. Following his work at the University of Tübingen in Germany, he decided to take a new direction in his career and joined the Neuropathology Department at the University Hospital in Zurich, where he received his PhD.
In 2020, he joined Dr. Ido Amit’s laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

Since early 2025, he is directing a junior research group at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ).