Guest Lecture Series Medical Information Sciences

Veranstaltungsort: Hörsaal N2045 (Fakultät für Angewandte Informatik)

Abstract

Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has become a promising option for patients with relapsed or refractory lymphoma. This and similar types of cellular immunotherapies are being investigated for many other cancers, such as acute leukemias. Mathematical modeling provides a useful tool for analyzing the interactions of these ‘living drugs’ with targeted cancer cells and the diverse immune or inflammatory contexts of patients. By integrating longitudinal data from experiments and clinical or laboratory studies, we examine how various, potentially patient-specific CAR T cell and cancer phenotypes interact with heterogeneous tumors, how these interactions can be inferred, and how they affect outcomes.

Referent:   Prof. Dr. Philipp Altrock

Kurzbiographie

Philipp Altrock’s research focuses on the dynamical systems that arise in the context of cancer evolution and cancer ecology. At Kiel University, he is the Heisenberg Professor for Cancer Modeling and Evolution. His research group investigates cancer and related diseases using methods from statistics, data science, theoretical physics, and mathematical biology. The goal is to understand the better evolution (mutation, selection, and adaptation) and ecology (cellular interactions, heterogeneity, drug-target interactions) of cancer.

Philipp received his degree in physics from Leipzig University in 2007, obtained his doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) from Kiel University in 2011, and did postdoctoral work at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts from 2013-2017. From 2017 to 21, he was a group leader at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Recently, Philipp Altrock has worked as a consultant in the biomedical industry and served as a project leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology from 2021 to 2025. Philipp was awarded a Leopoldina. In 2021, he received the Moffitt Cancer Center 2020 Junior Faculty Research Award, and in 2024, he was admitted into the DFG Heisenberg Program.

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