Improving T cell resistance to stiff tumour enviroments

Human health faces constant challenges from environmental insults like infections, cancer, and tissue damage, with the immune system playing a key role in responding to these threats.

It has become evident that immune responses are not only shaped by ligand-receptor interactions but also by biomechanical cues from the tissue environment. For example, tumour tissues, can be significantly stiffer and experience higher 3D compression forces, thereby influencing the ability of cytotoxic T cells (CTLs) to access tumours and function within them.

In this project we will study how CTLs sense mechanical pressure and how they generate force and will develop strategies to improve their resistance to those biomechanically hostile environments. Particularly we will study if we can exploit those mechanosensing and transducing pathways to increase the mechanical fitness of CAR T cells in murine models of cancer.