The lab investigates mechanistic and therapeutic implications of the Cancer Stem Cell concept, seeking to identify targetable mechanisms of cancer progression and metastasis. Similar to their normal tissue counterpart, cancers have been shown to contain a subset of cells with stem-like properties with the unique ability to perpetuate tumor growth, to cause recurrence and to give rise to metastatic spread. Cancer Stem Cells are often rare and notoriously resistant against chemotherapeutic agents as well as radiotherapy. While most cancer therapies target cell proliferation or aim to trigger cancer cell death, we are working on therapies which alter the phenotype of cancer cells by inducing differentiation of stem cells as an promising alternative.

Metastasis formation is the cause of cancer-related death in over 90% of patients. Nevertheless, metastasis formation is a rather inefficient, multi-step process with only very few cancer cells establishing satellite colonies in a distant organ. This is believed to reflect inappropriate communication between tumor cells and the local microenvironment, a process we are studying in detail. The molecular characterization and therapeutic exploitation of factors that promote or suppress metastatic seeding may provide new directions for developing metastasis preventive agents.

Cancer heterogeneity and plasticity is increasingly understood as a major problem responsible for therapy resistance. This will require detailed and integrated diagnostic procedures which combine expression-based analysis with functional screens to provide individualized therapeutic options tailored to the specific properties of each patient's tumor. We have recently developed high-content, high-throughput screening systems which provide such possibilities and which we are currently testing in a clinical setting.

We are further working to design new approaches of cell-based immunotherapy whereby NK and T cells are equipped with enhanced recognition abilities to specifically target cancer cells. Here, we are in particular interested to develop technologies which allow to recognize only combinations of markers in order to improve selectivity and precision of such cell based therapies.