Prestigious travel grant to DTU Health Tech PhD Student

Immunotherapy is a hot research topic. In basic terms, immunotherapy enhances the immune system’s ability to recognize malignant cells for example to treat cancer.

In his PhD project, Nikolaj will apply novel screening technologies for T cell recognition that records the malignant target and the function of the tumor-infiltrating T cells. The perspectives of this work is that researchers can record what T cells successfully recognized and overcame the immunosuppressive tumor environment following therapy. The goal of the project is that it will lead to new discoveries in terms of which malignant proteins to target, when we design the next generation of higher efficacy immunotherapies.

Destination: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, USA

The travel grant means that Nikolaj can include a research stay at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York in his PhD.

“I’ll learn about data science, and apply it to analyze large public datasets of genomes on a single-cell level. This new knowledge will be integrated in our activities at DTU Health Tech in the T-cells and Cancer group, and make it possible for us to answer the following questions, 1) What did a given antigen-specific T cell target? 2) Was it activated at the point of interrogation? 3) Are non-activated, antigen-specific T cell non-beneficial to the patient?” says PhD Student Nikolaj Pagh Kristensen.

(Photo: PhD Student Nikolaj Pagh Kristensen. Photo by Jesper Scheel)