GCIR member: Camilla Jandus

Camilla Jandus, MD, PhD, is tenure-track assistant professor and head of the “Targeting of cytokine secreting cell group (TCSL)” at the Department of Pathology and Immunology at the University of Geneva. Professor Jandus graduated in 2003 from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Bern, Switzerland, after a training at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and then obtained her MD thesis from the Institute of Pathology in Bern. From 2004 to 2008 she performed her MD-PhD training at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne, in the group of Prof P. Romero. Then, she joined for a 2-year post-doctoral training at the Pharmacology Institute in Bern. In 2012, she was appointed associate investigator at the Ludwig Centre for Cancer Research at the University of Lausanne, where from 2015-2018 she was supported by an Ambizione Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). In 2019 she has been appointed SNF PRIMA assistant professor at the Department of Oncology, University of Lausanne, and from January 2020 she has joined the Department of Pathology and Immunology at the University of Geneva as tenure-track assistant professor. Dr Jandus main scientific interest is in the study of T cell- and Innate Lymphoid Cell (ILC)- mediated immune responses to human tumors.

Read morehere: https://www.janduslab.com/

Presentation summary

Neuro-immune axis in cancer: ILC-you in the bladder!

Type 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) are key regulators of tissue homeostasis and play important roles in inflammatory diseases as well as in modulating tumor responses. We previously demonstrated that ILC2s act as pro-tumoral players in bladder cancer patients by modulating the myeloid-monocyte derived suppressor cell (M-MDSC)-T cell ratio in an IL-13 dependent manner. Accordingly, mice lacking ILC2s showed a better survival compared to wild-type animals after intravesical instillation of the murine MB49 bladder tumor cell line. Nevertheless, the upstream molecular triggers of ILC2s in the bladder remain unknown.

Here, we identified a novel neuro-immune axis shaping ILC2 pro-tumoral functions in bladder cancer patients and in a murine bladder cancer model. Our results suggest a neuro-immune interplay between ILC2s, the bladder environment and bladder cancer cells in maintaining tissue homeostasis and sustaining malignancy, respectively.