Our Focus
In the past decade, cancer immunotherapy has emerged as a powerful approach revolutionizing the treatment landscape of cancer. As the most prominent example, immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) is now widely used across cancer types. Clinical responses to ICB, however, have been highly variable, with some cancer patients achieving durable remission and others experiencing no clinical benefit. Importantly, our understanding of how immune cell activity in human cancer tissues is influenced by therapy, and which properties of a tumour can determine response or resistance, is still highly limited. To this end, we are developing and exploiting novel patient-derived tumour models that allow us to study and perturb immune cell function within human cancer tissues. We apply these model systems in our research to (1) understand the diversity in immune cell activity in human cancers and its implications for therapy response, and (2) to translate the resulting knowledge into precision immuno-oncology strategies such as biomarkers or more personalized immunotherapies.
About Daniela Thommen
Daniela Thommen
My Research
Daniela Thommen obtained her PhD in 2010 at the University of Basel, Switzerland (Prof. Barbara Biedermann) for her studies on the role of antigen-specific cytotoxic T cells in endothelial damage. She then performed her residency training in Internal Medicine at the St. Claraspital Basel and in Medical Oncology at the University Hospital Basel, obtaining her board certification in 2015. In parallel to her clinical specialization, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Alfred Zippelius at the Department Biomedicine in Basel, focusing on the role of intratumoral T cell heterogeneity in the response to immune checkpoint blockade in human lung cancer. In 2016, she joined the group of Prof. Ton Schumacher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute supported by a postdoc fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, with the goal to develop ex vivo technologies for functionally studying T cell responses in human cancer samples. In 2020, she started her own lab as junior group leader and obtained tenure in 2023, joining the Netherlands Cancer Institute as permanent staff. Her research focusses on understanding the heterogeneity in intratumoral immune cell activity and its impact on treatment response or resistance. To this end, her group develops and exploits human tumor explant models to study patient-specific immunotherapy responses ex vivo and to develop new personalized immunotherapy strategies.
Awards
2023 Aspasia Award
2022 VIDI research grant (NWO)
2021 Arthur and Sandra Irving Cancer Immunology Scholar
2020 Melanoma Research Alliance Team Science Award
2019 KWF Young Investigator grant, Bas Mulder Award
2019 Swiss Pfizer Research Prize in Oncology
2019 SITC Women in Cancer Immunotherapy Network (WIN) Leadership Institute
2017 LIBRA Career Development Compass (EU-LIFE)
2016 Antelope Medical Professorship Program (University of Basel)
2016 Advanced Postdoc Mobility fellowship (Swiss National Science Foundation)
Key Publications
Kaptein P*, Jacoberger-Foissac C*, Dimitriadis P*, Voabil P, de Bruijn M, Brokamp S, Reijers I, Versluis J, Nallan G, Triscott H, McDonald E, Tay J, Long GV, Blank CU†, Thommen DS†, Teng MWL†. Addition of interleukin-2 overcomes resistance to neoadjuvant CTLA4 and PD1 blockade in ex vivo patient tumors. Sci Transl Med 2022, 14(642):eabj9779. (*shared first authors, †shared senior authors)
Hummelink K, van der Noort V, Muller M, Schouten RD, Lalezari F, Peters D, Theelen WSME, Koelzer VH, Mertz KD, Zippelius A, van den Heuvel MM, Broeks A, Haanen JBAG, Schumacher TN, Meijer GA, Smit EF, Monkhorst K*, Thommen DS*. PD-1T TILs as a predictive biomarker for clinical benefit to PD-1 blockade in patients with advanced NSCLC. Clin Cancer Res 2022, 28(22):4893- 4906. (*shared senior authors)
Schumacher TN and Thommen DS. Tertiary lymphoid structures in cancer. Science 2022, 375(6576): eabf9419.
Voabil P*, de Bruijn M*, Roelofsen LM*, Hendriks SH, Brokamp S, van den Braber M, Broeks A, Sanders J, Herzig P, Zippelius A, Blank CU, Hartemink KJ, Monkhorst K, Haanen JBAG, Schumacher TN†, Thommen DS†. An ex vivo tumor fragment platform to dissect response to PD-1 blockade in cancer. Nat Med 2021, 27(7):1250-1261. (*shared first authors, †shared senior authors)
Thommen DS*, Koelzer VH, Herzig P, Roller A, Trefny M, Dimeloe S, Kiialainen A, Hanhart J, Schill C, Hess C, Savic Prince S, Wiese M, Lardinois D, Ho PC, Klein C, Karanikas V, Mertz KD, Schumacher TN, Zippelius A*. A transcriptionally and functionally distinct PD-1+ CD8+ T cell pool with predictive potential in non-small-cell lung cancer treated with PD-1 blockade. Nat Med 2018, 24(7):994-1004. (*Co-corresponding authors)
Members
| Daniela Thommen Group Leader | Christina Metoikidou Postdoc | Eline Runderkamp Technician |
| Floris van den Brekel PhD student | Janniek Mors Phd student | Marloes van Ingen Technician |
| Mercedes Machuca-Ostos PhD student | Mette Volkers Phd student | Nadine Slingerland PhD student |
| Paulien Kaptein PhD student | Timm Reissig PostDoc |