This international seminar series brings together speakers from our partner institutions across Europe and Singapore to present their research and how they use convergence science to answer cancer-related questions.
Chaired by Prof Kanaga Sabapathy (NTU). Join us on Thursday 3 September 10-11am BST/11-12 CEST/5-6pm SGT, register here to receive the joining link.
Dr Romeo Racz (Imperial)
Probing the Electrophysiology of Brain Tumours: Emerging Cancer Neurotechnology
Cancer neuroscience is revealing that brain tumours interact dynamically with the neural circuits in which they grow. In this talk, I will discuss our work developing neurotechnologies to investigate this electrophysiological dimension of brain cancer, from minimally perturbing neural interfaces and preclinical recordings in tumour-bearing brain to our emerging translational programme. I will outline how electrophysiology, electrochemistry and other complementary measurements may help us build functional maps of tumour and surrounding brain during surgery, and how the same biological understanding could ultimately inform new approaches to monitoring and treating disease.
Prof Simon Schäfer (TUM)
Rebuilding Human Brain-Immune Interfaces: Engineering Living Models of Human Brain Development and Disease
Brain-resident immune cells actively sense, interpret and reshape their tissue environment, yet their most relevant functions remain difficult to access in conventional model systems. This talk will present our efforts to engineer human organoid and assembloid platforms that reconstruct brain–immune interfaces in living tissue. By integrating stem-cell biology, bioengineering, single-cell profiling and in vivo transplantation, we use these systems to uncover how human microglia acquire context-dependent functions across health, disease and tumor-associated environments, and how these functions might ultimately be reprogrammed for therapeutic benefit.
