Institute for Diabetes and Cancer Translational Metabolic Oncology (TMO)
The research unit focusses on translational oncology with a special focus on markers and mechanisms of therapy response pursuing the mission of optimizing personalized cancer treatment strategies.
The research unit focusses on translational oncology with a special focus on markers and mechanisms of therapy response pursuing the mission of optimizing personalized cancer treatment strategies.
About our Research
Precision therapy of cancers requires a stratification of patients and an identification of therapeutic targets by integration of multi-level omics data, metabolic data and clinical data from oncological cohorts.
TMO collaborates tightly with local (LMU and TUM), national and international clinics and research partners. We have a particular focus on the investigation of radiotherapy response and the therapy of tumor recurrences of various cancer entities such as head and neck cancer and glioblastoma.
The personalized treatment of cancer requires finer grained stratification of patients for which we develop stratification markers and models predicting local and distant tumor control after radiotherapy. The grand challenges in clinical oncology are therapy failure and the occurrence of tumor relapses after radiotherapy. Main causes of therapy failures are tumor heterogeneity, tumor immune escape, tumor metabolic processes and tumor-intrinsic signaling that lead to therapeutic resistance. To this end, TMO identifies molecular and metabolic subtypes of tumors that reflect the aforementioned determinants of therapeutic failure. At the same time, we use these insights to identify novel therapeutic targets and combination therapies.
To achieve these research goals TMO combines the following research fields:
- Translational bioinformatics: multi-big data bulk and single-cell omics for the in-depth characterization of oncological cohorts and model systems. Regression and deep learning-based prognostic models.
- Experimental Translational Oncology: clinical cohorts and multi-omics data forprognostic patient stratification markers and therapeutic intervention targets. Clinical implications of tumor heterogeneity and tumor-microenvironment interaction.
- Metabolic therapy response: tumor metabolism and therapy response. Metabolic characterization and stratification. Multi-level data from clinical samples and pre-clinical models for metabolic intervention strategies.
Latest Publications of Our Research Unit
See all2022 European Journal of Cancer
DeepClassPathway: Molecular pathway aware classification using explainable deep learning
2022 Mol Cancer
2022 Cancers
2022 Clin Cancer Res.
Therapy-Related Transcriptional Subtypes in Matched Primary and Recurrent Head and Neck Cancer.
2020 Neurooncol Adv.
2019 Clin Cancer Res.
2018 Mol Oncol