4th HI-TRON Mainz Symposium

Program

Conference Program

4th HI-TRON Mainz Symposium

Thursday, 7th May 2026 

 

09:00 am	Registration and Welcome Coffee
09:30 am	Opening by Hedda Wardemann Spokesperson DKFZ Topic “Immunology, Infection and Cancer”, including HI-TRON Mainz
09:45 am	Keynote Lecture by James Spicer Professor of Experimental Cancer Medicine, King‘s College London, UK
10:30 am	Session 1: Enabling Technologies for Precision Immunotherapy Chair: Niels Halama High Sensitivity Immunopeptidomics for TCR specificity deconvolution Stefan Tenzer, HI-TRON Division “Immunoproteomics” and UMC Mainz Development of a versatile high-throughput immunopeptidomics workflow applied to clinical samples Megan Ford and David Gomez-Zepeda, HI-TRON platform “Immunopeptidomics” Quantum computing for personalized medicine: advances in quantum kernel utilization for machine learning Florian Heininger, HI-TRON Division “Tumor Immunology and Tumor Immunotherapy” Precision DNA Delivery for In Vivo T-Cell Engineering Alexandra Alves-Duarte, HI-TRON Division “mRNA Cancer Immunotherapies” Next-Generation Lipid Nanoparticles for Therapeutic T Cell Engineering Ramzi Saeed, HI-TRON Division “Personalized Immunotherapies”
11:45 am	Innovative Technology Talk by Tian Qiu DKFZ Division Head “Smart Technologies for Tumor Therapy”
12:15 am	Lunch Break with Poster Session 1
1:15 pm	Session 2: Modulating the Tumor Microenvironment Chair: Stefan Tenzer Innate immunity in the abdominal cavity: lipid-laden macrophages as immuno-metabolic nexus in the microenvironment of omental metastases Niels Halama, HI-TRON Division “Tumor Immunology and Tumor Immunotherapy” The role of a fibrotic tumour microenvironment in skin cancer on the susceptibility to immunotherapy Shanice Gundel, HI-TRON Division “Dermal Oncoimunnology” mRNA-LNP Based Tumor Microenvironment Modulation Jannis Wißfeld, HI-TRON Division “mRNA Cancer Immunotherapies” and “Tumor Immunology and Tumor Immunotherapy” Stem-like lymphocytes at the origin of adaptive immune responses to infection and cancer Veit Buchholz, DKFZ Division “Immunology”, German Cancer Research Center Heidelberg
2:30 pm	Coffee break with Poster Session 2
3:00 pm	Session 3: Translational and Clinical Immunotherapy Strategies Chair: Thomas Kindler Investigator-initiated trials (IIT) to test immunotherapy combinations and digital innovation for personalized strategies in advanced gastrointestinal cancers Markus Möhler, Department of Internal Medicine I, UMC Mainz Targeted mRNA Delivery to Improve Responses to Immune Checkpoint Blockade Hannah Stockhausen, HI-TRON Division “Personalized Immunotherapies” PDAC Clinical Trial Platform: Zolbetuximab as a First Use Case Ibrahim Murathan Sektioglu, HI-TRON Division “Personalized Immunotherapies” Developing HLA-independent T-cell receptors against tumor-associated antigens for cellular therapy Thomas Wölfel, Department of Hematology and Medical Oncolgy, UMC Mainz
4:15 pm	Beyond the Field Lecture by Jamie Blundell Ursula Zoellner Professor and Research Group Leader, Early Cancer Institute, University of Cambridge, UK
5:00 pm	Closing Session