“Deconstruct-Reconstruct” – Decode cancer-immune crosstalk & probe with organoids

The Roose team at UCSF studies mechanisms of cell-cell interactions in immunology and cancer1-7, with emphasis on personalized medicine4,8 and single cell approaches9-11. Over the past 7 years, we shifted a large portion of our research efforts to understanding human biology and disease. We are deeply interested in the cellular networks that underpin autoimmune diseases and cancer, which I will talk about in my seminar at the Curie Institute. We “deconstruct” these diseases with single cell technology to generate hypotheses on disease-driving cellular networks.

Through our work on cancer & stem cells, we optimized organoid protocols, propagating, characterizing, and biobanking patient organoids. In my seminar I will cover the organoid pipelines we established in my lab and will present how we are combining these organoids with epithelial cell types together with other patient cell types in assembloids. I will particularly focus on how we are using assembloids to “reconstruct” disease and better understand cancer-immune cell crosstalk. We aim to deconstruct and reconstruct T cell subsets and explore functional T cell programs in the context of cancer metastasis and cancers for which immunotherapy needs to be improved. We believe that assembloids offer many opportunities to make basic research discoveries with direct translational potential.