Dr. Lucie Loyal studied immunobiology at the University of Freiburg and wrote her diploma thesis at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg in 2012. She went on to complete her doctorate at the International Max Planck Research School for Infectious Diseases and Immunology (IMPRS-IDI), thereby laying the groundwork for a research career in immunology. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, she continued her work within the research group of her doctoral supervisor Prof. Dr. Andreas Thiel at Charité Berlin and contributed significantly to the understanding of T-cell-based cross-reactivity to coronaviruses. She has been a researcher at the BIH since 2022 and served as a project lead since 2025.
Dr. Lucie Loyal has received numerous awards and grants, including a Postdoctoral Award from the Robert Koch Foundation, funding from the national Translational Tandem Program for Gene- and Cell-based Therapies (nTTP-GCT), and a First Application Grant from EKFS in 2025.
In her EKFS-funded project, she aims to enable and further refine individualized cancer therapies. Effective T-cell responses are crucial for tumor control and largely depend on the binding strength (avidity) of the T-cell receptor (TCR). Together with her team, she developed an assay for the accelerated and scalable measurement of this avidity. They are now investigating whether this CATCH assay can be used in patients with melanoma to predict the treatment response prior to immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, thereby enabling more individualized treatment decisions. The team is also exploring whether the assay could aid in the high-throughput identification of suitable TCRs for adoptive T-cell transfer therapy.
Despite the complexity of these scientific challenges, Dr. Lucie Loyal remains highly committed: “Working as part of a team on medically relevant questions and deriving reliable insights from complex datasets is what motivates me most. The translational aspect is particularly important to me – ensuring that our research ultimately helps to improve cancer therapies.”
Born deaf, Dr. Lucie Loyal has built an academic career in a system that is still largely tailored to hearing researchers. The pandemic brought significant changes: With the sharp increase in online meetings, AI-based language models and cloud-based automatic captioning improved significantly. Specialized interpreters are still rarely available in highly academic environments though. Before these technological advances, she mainly had to compensate for communication barriers by reading extensive scientific literature to access knowledge in areas where the spoken exchange was not fully accessible to her.
Alongside her scientific activities, Dr. Lucie Loyal has contributed to the BIH anti-discrimination working group since 2024. “The visibility of people with disabilities in science is an important concern for me, as we remain clearly underrepresented because of the persistent barriers,” she says. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling, spending time in nature, doing sports, and pursuing her political and civic interests.