When cancer cells leave the primary tumor to seed in other organs, they need to seek the help of different cell types in distinct environments to make their journey successful. Lymph nodes (LN), which counterintuitively are centers for T-cell-antigen priming, are the first metastatic relay before cancer cells disseminate to distant organs. Thereby, tumor-emanating signals can create a premetastatic niche in sentinel LN that renders T cells non-responsive to arriving tumor cells. However, the mechanistic underpinnings of how tumor cells induce a pre-metastatic niche in LNs, escape cell death and immunosurveillance upon seeding in the LN, and leave to settle in the lung and other organs, are less understood. The overarching goal of our project is to provide a first holistic view of the spatial and temporal 4D changes of the vascular, immune, and stromal components in the LNs from homeostasis to the metastatic state through state-of-the-art approaches (4D intravital imaging, single-cell/spatial transcriptional, spatial proteomic and metabolic profiling) of murine and human metastatic cancers.
Are you curious about the mechanistic underpinnings of metastatic spread and can you use your strong bioinformatics expertise and knowledge in programming languages and transcriptomic/multi-omic data analysis to help us unravel the complex interaction of cancer cells and their environments to enable metastatic spread? Are you driven to establish your research project and enjoy working with a multidisciplinary team in a dynamic, stimulating working environment and close collaboration with clinical and industrial partners?
You will work with the teams of Prof. Colinda Scheele and Prof. Gabriele Bergers at the VIB branch Center for Cancer Biology (CCB) at KU Leuven/Campus Gasthuisberg in Leuven (Belgium). The VIB is a top research institute for life sciences. The VIB-CCB entails 12 leading research groups in (immuno-)oncology, the tumor microenvironment, genetics/multi-omics, molecular biology, and translational research with core facilities and excellence centers that are well-equipped with the newest state-of-the-art technologies relating to single cell/spatial transcriptomics, metabolomics, FACS, and multiplex profiling. In addition, VIB recently established an artificial intelligence (AI) center, which will further foster interactions and collaborations relating to computational projects within the different VIB centers.
You can find more information about our center and our teams here:

• Our center: https://ccb.sites.vib.be/en#/
  
• Scheele lab: https://scheelelab.sites.vib.be/en
  
• Bergers lab: https://bergerslab.sites.vib.be/en

How to apply?

If you want to make the journey with us to unravel metastatic spread in time and space, please complete the online application procedure (https://jobs.vib.be/apply/9567...) and include:

• A detailed CV, including a list of your scientific publications
• A detailed cover letter describing your motivation
• The contact information of 3 referees

Application deadline: December 15, 2024.