‘Gut, Liver and Friends’ Seminar with Benjamin Ruf

On Wednesday, 12.03.2025 at 16:00, Benjamin Ruf, M.D., will be the speaker of our ‘Gut, Liver and Friends‘ seminar.

Benjamin Ruf is a physician-scientist focusing on tumor immunology and immunotherapy in gastrointestinal cancers. Benjamin received his M.D. from studies at the University of Tübingen, King’s College London and the University of Aberdeen. After graduation, he started residency in Internal Medicine with a focus on Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Gastro-Oncology at the University Hospital in Tübingen, Germany. Between 2019-2023 he did postdoctoral studies at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) with Dr. Tim Greten. Back in Tübingen, he works as an independent group leader at the M3 Research Institute and the University Hospital Tübingen and tries to better understand how we can use our body’s own immune system to fight cancers.

In his lab, he aims to expand our knowledge of the composition, phenotype, and organization of the tumor immune microenvironment (TiME) in gastrointestinal cancers with the goal to ultimately improve patient care. His research is located at an exciting interface between basic immunology, translational and clinical research. He uses clinical data to guide our research focus, he uses systems biology approaches to build hypotheses and then test these hypotheses in functional in vivo and in vitro models. He employs complementary experimental strategies to investigate the TiME in patient samples including scRNA-seq, spatial proteomics and high-dimensional spectral cytometry. Using these approaches, he studies how reciprocal communications between the innate and adaptive immune system, stomal cells and cancer cells are altered in response to tumor initiation, progression, and response to (immuno)therapy. One focus of his research program is to investigate the role of tissue-resident lymphocytes, in particular mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells, in the context of cancer. Beyond that and following up on previous studies, he continues to explore how the liver as a site of primary tumorigenesis or metastasis represents a unique tumor microenvironment that requires special consideration.

His talk will be entitled:

“Targeting Mucosal-Associated Invariant T (MAIT) cells in liver cancer – using functional in situ phenotyping to guide precision immunotherapy”.