Teamleader: Theresa Bunse, PhD
Despite a strict control of immune processes in the central nervous system (CNS), CNS immunity is off balance during autoimmune diseases and in CNS tumors such as gliomas or brain metastases where active immunosuppression takes place. Despite success in other solid tumors, immunotherapies such as checkpoint inhibition (CPI) have not achieved sufficient immune re-activation in brain tumors.
The focus of the team is to understand the complex mechanisms which lay behind a response or the resistance to cancer immunotherapies such as CPI, with the commitment to explore and exploit targets for improvement of clinical outcome. Previous data suggest a critical role for the myeloid compartment including tumor-associated macrophages (TAM), interacting with T effector cells, which we are currently looking at in detail to dissect immune microenvironmental determinants that shape a responsive phenotype.
Our research is driven by clinical data-based hypotheses, which we probe in various – mostly immunocompetent – genetic mouse models.
