Author Spotlight: Unlocking Insights into the Immune Cell Landscape of Tumors

Our aim is to identify the amount, type, and location of immune cells within the tumor microenvironments. In the field of immunochemistry, there have been major advance in technology in recent years. Advance in multiplex immunochemistry technology allow for more markers to be reliably studied.

Current experimental challenges are visualize specific types of immune cells within tumor samples, which have been overcome by using the multiplex immunochemistry methods. However, accurate automatic analysis of these images is still a challenge that we're working on. The differences between immune cell landscape between primary and metastatic tumors generate questions such as, what tumor intrinsic properties drive these differences, and what do these differences mean for therapies that target the immune system?

Next to our exploratory work, we will also focus on clinically relevant questions such as how the immune cell landscape of the tumor is affected by different types of anti-cancer therapies and whether the immune cell landscape could predict the outcome of therapy.