Mehdi Manoochehri received his PhD in medical and molecular biotechnology from Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. During his doctorate, he was a visiting scientist at the German Cancer Research Center (dfkz) in Heidelberg. There he initiated and led several projects on molecular oncology and cancer diagnostics with a focus on breast and pancreatic cancer, which he completed as a postdoc. Together with his team members, he identified and validated tumour- and immune cell-specific biomarkers for the minimally invasive detection of cancer using liquid biopsy. He then worked as a scientist at the Fraunhofer IGB in Stuttgart, where he was involved in a large clinical trial on next-generation diagnostics of causative pathogens in sepsis using next-generation sequencing (NGS). He has also established and clinically validated epigenetic biomarkers that could offer a promising in vitro diagnostic approach for predicting organ damage.