EXPANDing Immune Cells and their Tumor Antigens during Checkpoint Immunotherapy

Prof. Diether Lambrechts, PhD
Science Director, Center for Cancer Biology, VIB, LeuvenFull Professor, Department for Human Genetics, University of Leuven, Belgium

Abstract : Cancer immunotherapy using immune-checkpoint blockade (ICB) has created a paradigm shift in the treatment of advanced-stage cancers. In terms of lives saved and person-years restored, these therapies promise to be more significant than any other form of cancer treatment. However, one of the major limitations of ICB is that it provides durable clinical responses only in a fraction of patients. Single-cell (spatial) technologies have been exceptionally instrumental in highlighting how checkpoint immunotherapy works in some patients, and why not in other patients. During my talk, I will highlight how T-cells respond differently to these therapies, which surrounding microenvironments are needed to provide durable responses and where in the tumor tissue these T-cells need to be located. I will also highlight how responding T-cells and the tumor antigens that they recognize can be characterized, and how this information can be harnessed to develop novel synergistic therapies that can be combined with approved checkpoint inhibitors.

Biosketch : Professor Diether Lambrechts, PhDVIB Center for Cancer Biology and University of Leuven, Belgium

Professor Diether Lambrechts is Group Leader at the VIB and Full Professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

Prof. Lambrechts was trained as an engineer at the University of Leuven where he also pursued his PhD. He then worked at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, UK, before joining the VIB as an independent Group Leader in 2008. He currently holds a Kuang-Piu professorship chair at Zhejiang University. He has won several awards, including the Karel-Lodewijk Award for Human Medicine; the Galenus Prize for Pharmacology; the AstraZeneca Award for Translational Research and the Agilent Thought Leadership Award.The expertise of the Laboratory for Translational Genetics is focused on tackling important questions in oncology by translating genome-scale data sets into clinically applicable knowledge. In recent years, he has developed a special interest in dissecting the tumor microenvironment using single-cell technologies. He was among the first to characterize the lung tumor stroma (Lambrechts et al., Nat Med 2018) and in comparing stromal cells residing in tumor versus normal tissues across various cancer types (Qian et al. Cell Res 2020). Currently, he is focusing his team’s efforts on studying changes in the tumor microenvironment during checkpoint immunotherapy at single-cell level (Bassez et al., Nat Med 2021). In this context, his lab is also applying the most recent spatial technologies to better understand how tumors respond to checkpoint inhibition (Franken et al., Immunity 2024) and on identifying the antigenic landscape that is driving T-cell actvation and expansion during checkpoint immunotherapy.

Since 2015, Prof. Lambrechts has been Director of the VIB Center for Cancer Biology in Leuven, Belgium.