Extension of SATURN3 Funding for Intratumoral Heterogeneity Research

Since 2022, scientists at the LIT, led by Prof. Philipp Beckhove, Scientific Director and Head of Interventional Immunology Division, have been investigating intratumoral heterogeneity - the phenomenon that tumors undergo significant individual changes as the disease progresses - as part of the SATURN3 consortium. The Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space has extended this funding until June 2027 and increased it by around €220,000 to a total of nearly €600,000.

Find out more about the SATURN3 consortium.

Date Published

December 16, 2025

The SATURN3 funding supports a strong, internationally competitive consortium aimed at improving treatment options for cancer patients within the framework of the National Decade Against Cancer. Nearly 20 participating sites focus on the three currently most challenging cancer types: breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancer.

This challenge applies to these and many other cancers: as tumor cells change, drugs become less effective. Intratumoral heterogeneity thus significantly complicates therapy. To better track these changes, researchers involved in SATURN3 analyze biomaterials from cancer patients before and after treatment, before and after relapse, and before and after metastasis. Their goal is to capture tumor tissue changes over extended periods of time and across various stages of disease – always with the aim of developing new diagnostics and comprehensive therapeutic concepts.

At the LIT, research focus lies on the special role of tumor-specific T cells that adapt both functionally and phenotypically to the tumor tissue. This mechanism sometimes promotes tumor progression, treatment resistance, and metastasis rather than strengthening the immune defense. “To understand this mechanism, we systematically characterize the interplay of the underlying genetic, molecular and cellular patterns,” says Dr. Maria Xydia, Head of Immune Monitoring at the LIT. Building on these analyses, the key molecular interaction pathways between tumor stroma and immune cells could ultimately be predicted and experimentally validated.