Unveiling the role of T cell dysfunction in the development and progression of glioblastoma

My area of expertise is tumour immunology, particularly T cell biology and the generation of memory T cells in non-lymphoid tissues. I did my Ph.D. in Chile at Fundacion Ciencia & Vida studying the role of skin-resident memory CD8 T cells in the immunity against melanoma. My work was one of the first to show the role of tissue-resident memory CD8 T cells in the immunity against tumours. During my Ph.D., I also became interested on skin dendritic cells and their role on T cell memory, area I explored during an internship at Stanford University in the United States. At the end of my Ph.D., I moved to the United Kingdom and start my postdoctoral research at UCL mentored by Professor Sergio Quezada. The question I am currently pursuing is why tumours scape immune surveillance and develop even in the presence of an ongoing immune response. Given that T cells are key players of tumour immunity, whether these cells become dysfunctional losing their ability to destroy cancer cells could be one of the main mechanisms of tumour scape. In this context, glioblastoma appears as a unique opportunity to study T cell dysfunction given its immunosuppressive environment. I am convinced that studying the mechanisms by which glioblastoma makes T cells dysfunctional will give us a clue of unknown regulators of this process that could be used to develop novel immunotherapies.