Juliane Liepe

Juliane Liepe serves as Research Group Leader of the Quantitative and Systems Biology group at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry since 2017, previously holding positions as NC3Rs David Sainsbury Research Fellow and postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London.

Her educational foundation combines a Diploma in Biochemistry and Mathematics studies at the University of Potsdam with an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Theoretical Systems Biology from Imperial College London.

Research focuses on computational dissection of proteasome-mediated immune recognition, specifically:

• Modeling proteasome-generated spliced peptides (PSPs) that constitute over one-third of MHC-class I epitopes
• Developing bioinformatics tools (invitroSPI, inSPIRE, iBench) for PSP identification from mass spectrometry data
• Creating machine learning algorithms to predict unconventional antigens from infected and cancerous cells

This work reveals how cellular waste recycling directly enables immune surveillance against pathogens and tumors.

Awarded the prestigious ERC Starting Grant in 2020 with €1.5 million funding, her project pioneers in silico modeling of immune cell communication to predict antigen presentation dynamics.

Her group operates through intensive international collaboration with European and U.S. partners, integrating ex vivo experimental data with computational approaches to advance systems immunology. Current work focuses on translating proteasome splicing mechanisms into therapeutic strategies for cancer immunotherapy and infectious disease response.