Lecture will be held in English

Assistant Professor at the Università della Svizzera italiana

Roger Geiger obtained his Master’s and PhD degrees from ETH Zürich. During his PhD studies with Ari Helenius, Roger studied how non-enveloped viruses penetrate the host cell membrane. He then joined the laboratory of Antonio Lanzavecchia at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) as a SystemsX postdoctoral fellow. His research focused on metabolic regulation of T cell responses. In 2016, Roger joined the research group of Matthias Mann at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich and received training in mass spectrometry-based proteomics. In 2017, Roger started his research group at the IRB with the goal to study immune responses to tumors using systems biology approaches. He is Assistant Professor at USI and a recipient of an ERC Starting grant.

More info

Hosted by

Vítězslav Bryja

About the lecture

"Systems Analyses of Anti-Tumor T Cell Responses"

"I am excited to share an overview of our laboratory’s activity, which is focused on engineering new approaches for immunotherapy. In the first project, we analyzed protein turnover in naïve T cells and obtained new insights into how T cells maintain a prepared state to mount rapid immune responses. In another project, we performed metabolomic profiling on T cells, which led to the finding that the amino acid L-arginine enhances anti-tumor effector functions of T cells. To locally increase L-arginine concentrations in tumors, we engineered a probiotic bacterial strain that converts ammonia, a metabolic waste product that accumulates in tumors, into L-arginine. These bacteria colonize tumors, increase local L-arginine concentrations, and have synergistic therapeutic efficacy with PD-L1 blocking antibodies. In a third project, we analyzed proteomes of T cells and macrophages from tumors of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma and identified new targets for immunotherapy."

Registration for lunch with the speaker /for Ph.D. students/

The sponsored lunch usually takes place in the Campus River restaurant. Please meet the speaker and other students at 12:45 at the reception desk at the main entrance (building B22, see the map below).