Marcin Piotr Cieslik, Ph.D., Tech Impact Award Grantee University of Michigan

Biomarkers—measurable biological factors that shed light a patient’s health and disease—can provide valuable information to doctors and help guide their treatment decisions. The most promising biomarkers, such as the ImmunoScore for colorectal cancer, interrogate the spatial characteristics of tumor-infiltrating immune cells. Because these spatial immune biomarkers can gauge how tumors will evolve, they have prognostic value and also the potential to help predict how a patient might respond to a certain treatment. In order to develop additional biomarkers that are clinically valuable, novel approaches are needed to further characterize immune cells at spatial resolution.

To that end, Dr. Cieslik is using a technology known as T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire profiling to characterize anti-tumor immune responses within tissues and, for the first time, to identify individual T cells by the cancer-associated protein they target as well as their physical location with the tumor. With this novel strategy, his team expects to determine whether or not the presence of certain populations of T cells within tumors might provide another valuable biomarker for doctors and patients in the clinic. Additionally, once established, this approach should have a significant impact on the field’s ability to study the recruitment and expansion of T cell populations within tumors, which could provide the groundwork for the development of even more effective immunotherapies for cancer.

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