Raphael Mattiuz
Post-doctoral Fellow
Raphael is a postdoctoral fellow from France. He completed his PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Marc Dalod at the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy on the role of type 1 conventional dendritic cells in breast cancer immunosurveillance. The key steps leading to the tumor escape and subversion of the immune system are still obscure. The laboratory recently identified a molecular state of dendritic cells (DCs) upon tumor antigen uptake named ‘mature DCs enriched in immunoregulatory molecules’ (mreg DCs) (Maier et al. Nature 2020). mreg DCs express both maturation genes associated with T cell stimulation but also genes associated with immunoregulation. These results suggest that the balance of the mreg DC regulatory and activation program will determine the behavior of tumor specific T cells. During his postdoc, Raphael propose to build on these findings to determine some of the molecular drivers of the regulatory module expressed by mreg DCs and exploit this knowledge to enhance DC immunogenicity and antitumor immunity. Then, he will determine mreg DCs spatial functional contribution to T cell dependent antitumor immunity (in the tumor microenvironment versus the tumor draining lymph node) in mice an patients.
Fellowship: AACR-AstraZeneca Immuno-oncology Research Fellowship
Fun facts about myself:
I was a guitarist in a garage rock band
I am an architecture enthusiast
Chess lover