Christoph Bock Lab @ CeMM & MedUni Vienna

We study cancer and immunology, combining experimental biology with high-throughput technology, bioinformatic methods and machine learning. Our work is interdisciplinary and collaborative. We are equally committed to biological discovery and to advancing medicine.

CellWhisperer can now run on your laptop. Talk to your cells! And check out our paper: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Additional information about our research: cemm.at/research/group… | bocklab.org | med-ai.org Full job posting: cemm.at/fileadmin/img/… Further details & application portal: cemm.at/postdoc-program & cemm.onlyfy.jobs/job/7k2624z5

Maybe get some inspiration from our recent papers and consider proposing a project idea or research direction (as part of your application's cover letter) that connects your and our research expertise. Be ambitious & creative!

HIRING: We recruit postdocs via the CeMM Pre-ERC Postdoc Program (cemm.at/postdoc-program). Seeking 3 types of candidates: (1) experimental systems biology in immunity or cancer; (2) bioinformatics & biomedical ML/AI; (3) tech-dev & bioengineering (CRISPR, single-cell, spatial).

Further details & application portal: apply.cemm.at Additional information about our research group: cemm.at/research/group… | bocklab.org

What excites you? What could be a great PhD project? Please have a look at our recent publications and consider proposing an idea or research direction (as part of your application's cover letter) that you might want to pursue in our PhD. (4/5)

HIRING: We recruit PhD students via the AITHYRA-CeMM PhD Program. Seeking 3 types of candidates: (1) experimental systems biology in immunity or cancer; (2) bioinformatics & biomedical ML/AI; (3) tech-dev & bioengineering (CRISPR, single-cell, spatial, cell programming etc) (1/5)

Amazing new tool published @NatureBiotech on interactive analysis of single cell data. The study introduces CellWhisperer, an AI model that links transcriptomes with text descriptions to support natural language queries and zero shot cell type predictions, and integrates it with CELLxGENE for exploration. Really cool, no coding skills needed at all!

CellWhisperer From Transcriptome to Text A great LLM-Chatbot explorer for CELLxGENE & GEO & your own data! Contrastive language image pretraining Geneformer BioBERT >1 million bulk/pseudo-bulk transcriptomes cellwhisperer.bocklab.org @muronglizi @PenederPeter @BockLab @NatureBiotech 2025 nature.com/articles/s4158…

Multimodal learning enables chat-based exploration of single-cell data go.nature.com/3WPGJnW

🤝 Huge thanks to the team! @muronglizi & @PenederPeter with Daniel Malzl, @salvo_lombardo, @MihaelaPeycheva, Jake Burton, @ahak_hoom, @VarunSh84408069, @TKrausgruber, @celinesin00, @MencheLab, @tomazoulab, @BockLab, @CeMM_News, @MedUni_Wien, @MaxPerutzLabs, @StAnna_CCRI (11/11)

🧬CellWhisperer introduces a chat-based way to explore scRNA-seq data. By enabling natural language analysis, it bridges biologists and bioinformaticians—paving the way for AI-driven bioinformatics assistants. (10/11)

🗨️ Just published in @NatureBiotech: Our CellWhisperer AI enables chat-based analysis of single-cell sequencing data. You can talk to your cells & figure out the biology without writing any computer code. Paper link and annotated walkthrough in the thread below (1/11)