The impact of AI on society at large is manifesting rapidly, where most people have interacted with AI to generate text or edit photos. However, we also see increasing application for AI in healthcare. My group focuses on the application of modern AI techniques to oncological data, such as radiological and pathological images or ‘omics. We have a diverse expertise, ranging from clinical pathology to computer science, from artificial intelligence to biomedical sciences. Specifically, we aim to employ AI to address two research directions: 1) AI for scientific discovery, such as identifying patterns in the tumour and it’s microenvironment related to patient outcomes to drive future basic oncological research and 2) AI for supporting clinicians in their diagnosis to improve the efficiency, quality and reproducibility such as in prostate cancer grading. The former research line connects my group to the rest of the Oncode community, whereas the second research line offers closer links to industry and direct impact on diagnostic practice.
Our research is centered around the main question how to exploit the immune system to fight against cancer. Although immunotherapy has now successfully entered the clinic still a large number of patients do not benefit. Current research is focused on the design novel nanomedicines to more effectively activate the immune system
Our primary work focusses on synthetic dendritic cells, mimicking natural antigen presenting dendritic cells. Synthetic dendritic cells consist of polymer filaments on which antigens, cytokines and immunostimulants are adjoined by click chemistry techniques. These are designated ‘immunofilaments’ . We demonstrated that these not only can stimulate in vitro but also in vivo in preclinical mouse models
