DKTK School of Oncology Tech Talk: “Multiscale microscopy to understand systemic cancer immunotherapy“

For a long time, examining live tissue has been a significant challenge. However, the invention of multiphoton microscopy brought significant advancements, allowing for deeper insights. Bettina Weigelin illustrated how understanding the immune response to cancer requires monitoring of immune cell function at multiple biological levels, from cellular interactions within tissues to systemic activation and trafficking. Intravital microscopy (IVM) allows real-time observation of immune cell effector function within tumors in vivo. Higher harmonic generation (HHG), a label-free multiphoton imaging technique, further provides tissue context and reveals guidance structures that influence immune cell migration and modulate T cell efficacy in the tumor microenvironment. In addition, tissue clearing and light-sheet microscopy (LSM) have emerged as powerful tools to comprehensively analyze the efficacy of immune targeting of metastatic tumor cells in intact organs ex vivo. In combination, multiscale imaging allows the study of immune cell function from the cellular to the tissue and systemic levels.

The audience, DKTK School of Oncology Fellows and additional interested guests, ranging from Doctoral Researchers, to Postdocs and Clinician Scientists, who joined the DKTK Tech Talk, received insights into how the presented methods of microscopic imaging can help researchers understand the immune cell behavior in cancer. Following the presentation, the participants engaged in a lively discussion with the speaker to further deepen their understanding of the topic.  

About the speaker:

Bettina Weigelin is a professor for Preclinical Imaging of the Immune System at the Werner Siemens Imaging Center at the University of Tübingen, Germany. In 2015, she obtained her PhD in Medical Sciences from the Radboud University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where she applied intravital multiphoton imaging to study cancer invasion and immune function in solid tumors. With the support of a Rubicon Young Investigator Award (NWO), she spent 3 years as junior faculty (Instructor) at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, USA, where she used intravital microscopy to develop novel strategies for immunotargeting of prostate cancer bone metastasis. Her current research at the Medical Faculty of the University of Tübingen combines dynamic intravital microscopy with whole-organ light-sheet microscopy and macroscopic PET/MR imaging to provide mechanistic insights into cellular therapies at the tissue and whole-body scale to identify strategies for improved cancer immunotherapies.