The main research interests of Dr. Malenica are the adaptive tumor immunology and the cross-talk of CD8⁺ tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) with the tumor microenvironment (TME).

During her PhD, she focused on the functional characterisation of tissue-resident memory CD8⁺ T cells (TRM) in lung cancer and on the impact of tumor cells in TRM development. For addressing these complex question, Dr. Malenica established a cohort of more than 200 patients that included tumoral and blood samples in Gustave Roussy Institute, Villejuif (Paris), France. She developed new mouse and human cell lines with CRISPR/Cas9 technology for in vitro and in vivo experiments and applied a wide variety of techniques at biological and molecular levels.

Her overall research aim is to answer the question how the TME impacts functional development and cytotoxic capacities of TRM cell in tumors.  The main research interests of Dr. Ines Malenica Ambor are the adaptive tumor immunology of CD8 T cell and the crosstalk with the tumor microenvironment. She obtained a PhD from the Paris Saclay University in Paris, France where she worked on the induction of tissue-resident memory T cells in the tumor microenvironment. She had previously obtained 5 international grants for her research (French League against the cancer, French Government, CEEPUS, Italian Ministry of Health, AIRC), one poster communication Prize and authored 8 research papers (first author in Nature Communications). In Dr Lugli’s lab, she is currently working on dissecting the role of DNA damage in T cell differentiation in cancer immunology and on the single cell/ spatial transcriptomic analysis of immunotherapy-treated intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma patients.