Germline variation in anti-tumor immunity

It is largely unclear why some patients show major benefit from immunotherapy but others do not. One question that remains understudied is whether the variants of the genes we are born with modulate the immune response to cancer. We recently reported on the first example of common germline variants causally modulating anti-tumor immunity (Ostendorf et al., Nature Medicine, 2020). In this project we assess more broadly in what way our germline genetic makeup underlies the large inter-individual variability in response to immunotherapy. To this end, we combine the analysis of human clinical data with functional genomics approaches.