Connecting cancer immunity across scales: from sublethal T cell hits to systemic immune response

Please join us for the Virtual Pub on Friday, May 29, 2026, at 13:00 CEST. We are delighted to welcome Bettina Weigelin, University Hospital Tübingen, for a talk on "Connecting cancer immunity across scales: from sublethal T cell hits to systemic immune response."

Abstract

Cytotoxic T cells are central mediators of anti-cancer immunity, yet understanding how individual T cell-tumor cell interactions scale up to tissue-level and systemic immune responses remains a major challenge. Addressing this question requires imaging strategies that bridge very different spatial and temporal scales, from dynamic single-cell interactions to whole-organ and systemic response patterns. In this talk, I will present how a biological question in tumor immunology led us to build a multiscale imaging framework combining mechanistic in vitro microscopy, intravital imaging, tissue clearing, whole-organ light-sheet microscopy and correlative high-dimensional spatial profiling. Rather than developing these approaches in isolation, we use them as complementary tools to follow immune responses across scales and connect dynamic cell behavior with 3D tissue organization and spatial cellular phenotypes. This work illustrates how multiscale imaging can uncover hidden bottlenecks of T cell-mediated tumor control while opening new opportunities to study cancer immunity from cellular to systemic levels.