Dissecting and modulating reactive anti-tumor immunity in human cancers

Summary :Daniela Thommen is a Junior Group Leader at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. She received her MD and PhD from the University of Basel, Switzerland. In parallel to her clinical specialization in Medical Oncology, she worked as a research fellow in tumor immunology in the lab of Prof. Alfred Zippelius at the Department of Biomedicine in Basel. In 2016, she joined the lab of Prof. Ton Schumacher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute as a postdoctoral fellow, and started there her own lab in 2020. Her research focuses on understanding the role of heterogeneity in tumor immune composition, architecture and activity for immunotherapy response and on the development of novel biomarkers and personalized immunotherapy strategies using patient-derived organotypic models. Daniela Thommen is the recipient of the 2018 Bas Mulder Award from the Dutch Cancer Society and the 2019 Swiss Pfizer Research Prize in Oncology.