LIT Scientist is awarded a CIMT poster-prize
LIT scientist Christian Schmidl received an award for his poster “Integrated single-cell profiling dissects cell-state-specific enhancer landscapes of human tumor infiltrating T cells”, at the Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT) Annual Meeting in Mainz. The category for which Schmidl was awarded the prize is "Tumor Biology & Interaction with the Immune System”.
Article Details
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Date Published
May 17, 2022
The prize honors the recent work of Christian Schmidl’s group that is focused on T cells, specialized cells of our immune system that can recognize and kill cancer cells. However, T cells often become functionally impaired if they are surrounded by tumor cells and other suppressive immune cells. This phenomenon is also called “T cell exhaustion”, but the molecular mechanisms that drive T cells into dysfunction have not been completely understood yet. Christian’s group at the LIT investigates how the packaging of DNA differs in functional and dysfunctional T cells to get clues on which genes become activated and inactivated in T cells that infiltrate solid tumors. They identified a common set of genes that is changing their activity once T cells become exhausted. These findings represent potential targets for future therapeutic intervention aiming at reviving T cells to fight tumors.
Chrstian Schmidl with his poster.
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