DEMETRIOS PRIZE 2019! Optimizing T-Cell Culture in Microfluidic Devices

One of the winners, german Julia Pinter, focused his research on the subject of Cancer. Cancer is the disease with the highest mortality worldwide, treated with the same standard approaches for decades. This conventional therapy strategies do not take the evolutionary development of cancer into consideration nor the role of the immune system in this process. Cancer has been shown to hide from the immune surveillance by establishing an immunosuppressive microenvironment. Furthermore, tumor cells are rarely recognized as pathogens by immune cells since they originate from self-material. As a result, there is a recent trend in cancer treatment to redirect the immune system to cancer specificity. In the broad range of immunotherapies, especially the CAR T-cell therapy stands out due to its several advantages of precisely detecting tumor antigens since in this approach autologous T lymphocytes are genetically engineered ex vivo to express chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) which specifically bind to the antigen expressed on cancer cells.