How do cancer and the immune system interact?

The human body constantly cleans up the abnormal cells found in our bodies. Cancer cells can circumvent this system, however. How do they accomplish that?
In short, they change their environment in all sorts of ways to accommodate their survival, division, and metastasis. This requires them to exchange information with the surrounding cells, including immune cells. We investigate the ways in which this works, and whether we can potentially block the support that cancer cells extract from their environments.

Example projects

Macrophages

A lot of research in the cancer immunology field focuses on immune cells called T-cells. However, the potential of our immune system is much broader. This is why we also study immune cells called macrophages, for example. They are supposed to clean up cancer cells, but instead, cancer cells instruct macrophages to feed them. We study the communication between these cells because we want to be able to block it.