His contributions for over the past 25 years to the field of Neuroinflammation have had implications toward understanding Neurodegeneration and tissue loss in Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer disease and brain cancer.

[1] Becher trained with Jack Antel at the Montreal Neurological Institute where he developed numerous tools to manipulate microglial cells during inflammation.

Later, he pioneered the high-dimensional analyses of the immune landscape in MS and cancer (humans and animal models), leading to the discovery of biomarkers that predict responses to immunotherapy.

Becher’s early research is primarily focused on the role of antigen presenting cells in target recognition in the central nervous system in neuroinflammatory, and autoimmune disease.

[9] This was one of several studies which solidified the role of cytokine GM-CSF as a fundamental communication conduit between neurotropic T lymphocytes and disease-causing phagocytes in preclinical models of Neuroinflammation.

[10][11] In his research, he also highlighted the significance of pathogenic T cells to produce GM-CSF, as a vital step for the initiation and maintenance of the inflammatory cascade, which leads to progressive immunopathology and irreversible tissue destruction in neuroinflammation as well as in graft-versus-host disease.

His team is also involved in the early adaptation of machine-learning techniques for data mining with a goal to understand the role of cytokine-dysregulation vs. TcR self-reactivity in chronic inflammatory disease in patients.