Anna Sandström Gerdtsson

The SPOTLab group – Spatial profiling of tumour microenvironments

Immunotherapy is transforming cancer care, still the response rate to available immunotherapeutic drugs remains poor for many cancers, due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the tumour microenvironment.

Our lab focuses on exploration of tumour microenvironments through spatial omics and imaging, development of computational models for prediction of molecular and clinical features from histopathology images, and experimental evaluation of immune regulatory targets and combinatorial treatment strategies.

Our objective is to advance immuno-oncology through stratification tools and analysis of molecular targets for precision medicine. We conduct translational projects in collaboration with pre-clinical and clinical specialists, mathematicians and bioinformaticians.

The current focus is on ovarian cancer, the deadliest gynaecological cancer for which treatments options are few and the prognosis poor. The microenvironment in ovarian cancer is highly complex and variable, frequently harbouring inhibitory immune and stromal cells which contribute to the poor outcome and the low responsiveness to checkpoint inhibitors.

There is a need to better understand the interplay between tumour cells and surrounding immune and stromal cells in ovarian cancer, in order to develop tools for patient stratification and more effective therapies capable of priming the immune response. We aim to identify new molecular targets for subgroups of ovarian cancer patients, by finding and understanding key interactions governing immune escape.