People
PD Dr. Kilian Wistuba-Hamprecht
Research group leader
Kilian Wistuba-Hamprecht leads an independent research group in the section for Clinical Bioinformatics in the Department of Internal Medicine I of the University Hospital Tübingen since January 2022.
Kilian studied Biochemistry with a focus on immunology, virology and organic chemistry at the University of Tübingen, where he was awarded with a Diploma in 2012. He focused during his doctorate in the Pawelec lab on the development and application of flow cytometry based single cell immunomonitoring approaches in human ageing and cancer, including a research visit at the Singapore Immunology Network to study the then emerging mass cytometry technology. Kilian was advised during his doctorate by Professor Graham Pawelec and Professor Hans-Georg Rammensee and obtained his doctorate in 2016 by the University of Tübingen. During his postdoc studies from 2016 - 2019 at the Dermatology Department, University Hospital Tübingen, with Professor Claus Garbe and Professor Benjamin Weide, he focused on the investigations of biomarkers predicting the outcome after immune checkpoint blockade in metastasized melanoma and established a biobank as resource for current and future translational studies. The postdoctoral studies included a research visits at the Reker Hadrup lab, Technical University of Copenhagen and at the Kordasti lab, King’s College London. Kilian was awarded in 2019 with a Junior Research Group Leader position by the Medical Faculty, University of Tübingen, focusing on the investigation of the role of αβ and γδ T cells under immune checkpoint blockade. He was invited to become a member of the CIMT Immunoguiding Program (CIP) in 2019, which guides the development of innovative cancer immunotherpeutics through inter-lab harmonization and quality control education. Kilian submitted his “Habilitation” treatise in Experimental Immunology to the Medical Faculty, University of Tübingen in 2020.
The focus of the Wistuba-Hamprecht lab is in cancer immunology. Development of cancer usually occurs in later life through uncontrolled growth of mutated cells that are escaping immunosurveillance - a multi-facetted process of interactions between tissues and immune cells, where T cells play a central role in the adaptive arm of immunity. We are interested in monitoring the interplay between the immune system and the tumor through phenotypic and functional investigations of different peripheral and tumor-invasive T cell subsets, as well as immune suppressors in cancer patients to construct models predicting the outcome and to contribute to a better understanding of cancer immunosurveillance.
As a member of the DFG FOR 2799 “Receiving and translating signals via the γδ T cell receptor”, a major focus of our research is the investigation of the role of γδ T cells in cancer rejection.
The collaboration with the Berlin Aging Study-II aims at distinguishing immune parameters of aging from cancer-associated features, as the occurrence of solid cancer is usually limited to older individuals.