Diether Lambrechts

Professor Diether Lambrechts is Group Leader at the VIB and Full Professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium. His team developed a special interest in dissecting the tumor microenvironment using single-cell technologies. He was among the first to characterize the lung tumor stroma (Lambrechts et al., Nat Med 2018) and in comparing stromal cells residing in tumor versus normal tissues. Currently, his team is focusing on studying changes in the tumor microenvironment during checkpoint immunotherapy (Bassez et al., Nat Med 2021). In this context, his lab identified T-cell receptors responding to checkpoint immunotherapy and developed methods to identify the corresponding (dark) tumor antigens at high-throughput. Currently, these insights are being translated towards a first mRNA-based vaccination study in advanced hepatocellular carcinoma.