Guest Lecture | Marco Fritzsche: “Engineering New Technology to Harvest T-Cell Controlled Immunity”

About the Speaker

Marco Fritzsche

Professor Fritzsche is an experienced consultant in the biotechnology industries. He is also the Scientific Director of the Oxford-ZEISS Centre of Excellence and leads the Biophysical Immunology Laboratory between the Rosalind Franklin Institute and the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology at the University of Oxford, UK. He has worked with leaders in Europe, USA, and Asia.

Further information

Guest Lecture

“Engineering New Technology to Harvest T-Cell Controlled Immunity” 

Mechanical forces operate across biological scales, spanning from single piconewton T cell receptor engagements to multicellular tissue interactions. Measuring these forces reveals fundamental principles of immune cell function within mechanobiology, providing a framework for next generation immunotherapies such as mechanotunable chimeric antigen receptor T cells engineered for restrictive tumor microenvironments. Uncovering the underlying biophysical mechanisms of action illuminates how cancer cells modulate their mechanical properties to evade immune surveillance and suppress T cell cytotoxicity. Moving beyond single cells, bridging to native tissue architecture requires new optical and computational approaches. To address this challenge, we leverage state-of-the-art platforms from the Oxford-ZEISS Centre of Excellence, incorporating Selective Plane Illumination Lattice Light Sheet Microscopy and sub-second four-dimensional tracking. Coupled with AI-driven segmentation algorithms for tissue digitalization, this integrated framework facilitates rapid volumetric imaging and reaction diffusion mapping across multiple length scales, directly connecting nanoscale synaptic dynamics to complex three‑dimensional tumour microenvironments. Together, these technological innovations open up unprecedented opportunities to translate biophysical mechanisms into next generation cell therapies.