Our goal is to understand and engineer human T cell immunity to treat infectious diseases, cancer and autoimmunity.

T cells recognize parts of infected cells, tumor cells or sometimes even healthy cells. To do so, they are equipped with receptors. Every human being has about 100 million different T cell receptors! T cells are like a population inhabiting the human organism and their receptor is their unique fingerprint. T cells usually protect you, but sometimes they can cause problems. And they continuously change.

We aim to understand how T cell populations evolve based on their T cell receptor – and then to use this knowledge therapeutically. For this, we re-program T cells by replacing their T cell receptor through means of genetic engineering.