To fight infection and cancer, immune cells – called T cells – patrol our body. T cells are thought to move inside a tissue by squeezing through its pores without damaging it. While this strategy works well in healthy tissue, it means that T cells can’t progress in very dense tumor tissue, which limits the success of cancer immunotherapy. Can we teach T cells to migrate in those challenging environments? The young scientist Dr. Andrea Imle investigates at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Heidelberg (EMBL) how T cells can dig their way into dense fabricated tissue. Now, she wants to understand how T cells achieve this new type of mobility and if it could allow them to better invade tumors. She will use advanced sequencing technologies to understand the mechanism used by T cells to move into both dense tumors and dense fabricated tissue. Her vision is to train T cells how to migrate into dense environments, which might be one of the missing elements on the way to successful immunotherapy for solid tumors.

The project of Andrea Imle is supported from 2020 to 2021 by the “Young Investigator Fund for Innovative Research Ideas” of the Schering Stiftung and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.