报告人：唐力 教授 （瑞士洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL）生物工程研究所）
报告题目：Multidimensional Immunoengineering to Advance Cancer Immunotherapy: The Journey from Bench to Bedside and Back
报告时间：2026年11月13日（周五）下午15:30-16:30
报告地点：912-0130
报告内容：
Our immune system interacts with many diseases in a multidimensional manner, involving substantial biological, chemical, and physical exchanges. Manipulating these immunity-disease interactions may afford novel immunotherapies to better treat diseases such as cancer, an emerging field termed immunoengineering. Since founding the Laboratory of Biomaterials for Immunoengineering (LBI) at EPFL in 2016, my group has pursued a single question: how can the metabolism, chemistry, and mechanics of immune cells be engineered so that they durably defeat cancer, and how can those discoveries be turned into therapies for patients? That question has carried one of our findings from a basic mechanism all the way into first-in-human clinical trials.
My lab discovered that interleukin-10 (IL-10) reprograms the metabolism of terminally exhausted CD8+ T cells, a population largely refractory to immune checkpoint blockade, and directly reinvigorates their antitumor function (Guo et al., Nat. Immunol. 2021). Building on this discovery, we developed IL-10-expressing CAR-T cells that completely cleared established solid tumors and metastases in multiple syngeneic and xenograft models and induced stem-like memory responses conferring durable protection against rechallenge (Zhao et al., Nat. Biotechnol. 2024). Discovered and developed in my laboratory, these cells are now being evaluated in several ongoing first-in-human phase 1 trials for relapsed or refractory B-cell malignancies (DLBCL, B-ALL) and autoimmune diseases, where they are inducing durable complete remissions in treated patients (Xu et al., Lancet Haematol. 2025; Huang et al., JAMA Oncol. 2026). Closing the cycle from bedside back to bench, we analyzed clinical samples and found, surprisingly, that type 2, rather than type 1, immune function in anti-CD19 CAR-T infusion products strongly and positively correlates with ultra-long-term (>8 yr) relapse-free survival in B-ALL (Bai et al., Nature 2024b). We further showed that IL-4, the prototypical type 2 cytokine, directly reinvigorates exhausted CD8+ T cells to enhance antitumor immunity (Feng et al., Nature 2024a), revealing a previously unrecognized role of type 2 immunity in durable cancer control.
I will discuss how these discoveries arose, how they are being translated, and how what we learn from patients is already reshaping our next generation of ideas.
个人简介 ：
Li Tang is an Associate Professor at EPFL's Institute of Bioengineering and Materials Science, where he also serves as Vice Dean for Innovation at the School of Life Sciences and is Co-Founder & Chairman of Leman Biotech. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University, China, in 2007, and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. Jianjun Cheng. He was a CRI Irvington Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Darrell Irvine at Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 2013-2016. He joined the faculty of Institute of Bioengineering, and Institute of Materials Science & Engineering, at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in 2016, and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. His research focuses on multidimensional immunoengineering to advance cancer immunotherapies. Prof. Tang has received many prestigious awards, including the ERC Consolidator Grant (2025) and Starting Grant (2018), Biomaterials Award for Young Investigators (2024), Biomaterials Science Lectureship (2025), Leenaards Prize for Translational Medical Research (2025), Friedrich Miescher Award (2025), and Lem Prize (2025), and was named to Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2025), and MIT Technology Review's “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” in China (2020).
联系人：殷黎晨 教授