Recent breakthroughs in cancer immunotherapy, exemplified by immune checkpoint blockade and CAR T cell therapy, have achieved remarkable clinical success. However, the majority of cancer patients fail to respond to immunotherapy or suffer from relapse. Nan ...
Background Innate immune cells play a crucial role in responding to microbial infections, but their improper activation can also drive inflammatory disease. For this reason, their activation state is governed by a multitude of factors, including the metabo ...
Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the "fruit fly", is a genetically tractable model organism widely used to study biological processes, notably the innate immune system. The advent of novel genome editing technologies, such as the CRISPR-Cas9 syst ...
Innate immunity, the very first line of defence of our cells, relies on the detection of universal pathogen- or danger-associated signals to launch an inflammatory response. A crucial part of our innate immune system is based on the recognition of out-of-c ...
Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Early-stage disease can be detected with preventative medical screening and is treatable with surgical resection. Sixty-percent of patients, however, are diagnosed with advanced-stage ...
Genomic instability enhances cancer progression by favoring clonal diversity, yet uncontrolled replicative stress can lead to mitotic catastrophe and inflammatory responses promoting immune rejection. KRAB-containing zinc finger proteins (KZFPs) are epigen ...
Cell-cell communication is fundamental for immune balance. Multivalent interactions of surface receptors at immune interfaces drive specific communication, with stimulatory and inhibitory signals guiding the immune outcome. Notably, the valency, affinity, ...
The presence of competing events, such as death, makes it challenging to define causal effects on recurrent outcomes. In this thesis, I formalize causal inference for recurrent events, with and without competing events. I define several causal estimands an ...
Cancer immunotherapy has become an attractive strategy among different therapeutic modalities over the past few years and has showed great success in the clinic. However, there are many outstanding challenges hindering the current immunotherapies. In my Ph ...
Hepatitis B virus remains a major medical burden with more than 250 million chronically infected patients worldwide and 900,000 deaths each year, due to the disease progression towards severe complications (cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma). Despite the ...
