Local immune control of cancer

Cancer encompasses a plethora of neoplastic diseases that severely affects - and often threatens - the life of many people around the globe. According to current estimates by the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion, more than 32 million people are currently living with cancer, and almost every second person alive today will be diagnosed with cancer during his or her lifetime.

This research has led to the development of promising immuno­therapies that target cells of the immune system to fight cancer, such as Immune Checkpoint Inhibition and CAR T cell therapies.

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors have shown remarkable success for the treatment of advanced cancer, leading to unprecedented, long-lasting remission and potential cure in a fraction of patients.

Cancer cells have often developed mechanism to evade detection and destruction by the immune system in order to grow, which limits spon­taneous anti-cancer immunity and the success of current immuno­therapies. The group led by Dr. Jan Böttcher uses modern imaging techniques and bioinformatic analyses of cancer patient data to decipher the mechanisms that control anti-tumor immunity on a systemic level and locally within tumors and their surrounding micro­environment.

Major aims of the group are to identify and under­stand molecular mechanisms that could be targeted therapeutically to treat cancer, including the path­ways that regulate the access of innate and adaptive immune cells into tumours, the initiation and modulation of immune cell phenotypes and the local communication between immune cells within tumor tissue.

The International Junior Research Group cooperates with the Inter­national Graduate School „i-Target: Immunotargeting of cancer“ of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of Munich, the Technical University of Munich and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.