Natasja de Vries

Research

Immunotherapy has changed the management of oncologic treatment for many patients. However, still only a minority of cancer patients benefits from immunotherapeutic interventions, and resistance to treatment remains a major complication for advanced cancer patients. Previously our group has established expertise in the field of mass cytometry and single-cell RNA-sequencing to study mucosal immunology. In collaboration with the group of Noel de Miranda, we focus on characterizing immune cell populations across healthy and cancer tissues from patients with colorectal cancer and pancreatic cancer by functional, transcriptional, and spatial analyses. This could potentially give us a better understanding of mechanisms that determine responses to current cancer immunotherapies and could guide the design of alternative therapies.

Curriculum vitae

I studied Biomedical Sciences at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. During my Masters, I performed a research project at the Aarhus University in Denmark where I studied the peripheral blood immune cell profile of patients with colorectal cancer.