Bridging Borders in Cancer Research: Alumni Philipp Richter’s Doctoral Work on Personalized Therapy

Alumni Philipp Richter, originally from Hanover (Germany), is the first graduate of the first international cohort of medical students at UMFST-UMCH – Universitätsmedizin Neumarkt am Mieresch (the Hamburg Campus of UMFST). He has now chosen to continue with doctoral studies at UMFST in Târgu Mureş, becoming the first in his class to do so in Romania.

He opted to study medicine in English at UMFST-UMCH, rather than in German in his home country, because he felt that studying in English would give him a better foundation for an international career in research and medicine.

Philipp praises the UMFST-UMCH campus: modern facilities, digital dissection tools from year one, small-group teaching, and a blend of Romanian-taught theoretical courses and German-led hospital practicals. He says this mixed setting prepared him well for the clinical environment.

For his doctoral research, he will focus on a pathology topic: specifically, the concordance and discrepancy between immunohistochemical diagnosis and DNA-based PCR diagnosis of DNA-replication-error repair mechanisms in colorectal cancer patients from Germany and Târgu Mureş. He explains that although the two diagnostic methods target the same biological aspect, in some cases they diverge — and this discrepancy may be clinically significant, influencing whether a patient receives an optimal therapy.

Philipp says his family background includes several pathologists (his father, grandmother, grandfather and uncle), which influenced his interest in pathology — the microscopic visual-diagnostic work of pathology appealed to his interest in combining observation with clinical reasoning.

He was drawn to continue doctoral work in Romania because he already had connections with Romanian professors (such as Simona Gurzu‑Prundaru) and found an academic environment at UMFST that he felt could support international research collaborations.