Mirco Friedrich: Engineering the aged immune system - from thymic decline to in vivo cell therapy

Dr. Mirco Friedrich’s research sits at the interface of immunology, aging research and synthetic biology. He leads the Laboratory for Hematology and Immune Engineering at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and HI-STEM in Heidelberg and works as a physician in the Department of Hematology, Oncology and Rheumatology at Heidelberg University Hospital. His team asks why the immune system loses its power with age, and whether that process can be deliberately and safely reversed. With age the thymus produces almost no new T cells: infections take a more severe course, vaccines work less well, and tumours escape immune control - age remains by far the largest single risk factor for cancer. They recently showed that the liver can be transiently reprogrammed into a source of precisely those trophic factors that are lost with age. After a course of the corresponding mRNA, aged mice generated new T cells again, responded markedly better to vaccination and controlled tumours more effectively. The effect disappeared completely once treatment was stopped and was not accompanied by autoimmunity - a finding that says as much about the limits as about the possibilities of such interventions. In parallel, his team studies how the microenvironment of the bone marrow governs which T cells remain functional and which patients respond to immunotherapy, and develops AI systems that bring this evidence to the bedside in the care of patients with blood cancers. In this talk, Dr. Friedrich will discuss what these results mean for an engineering view of the aging immune system, and how the same principles are now being translated into in vivo mRNA and genome-edited cell therapies, including the first in-human genome-edited cell therapy trial conducted in Germany. Dienstag, 17.11.2026, 16:00 - 18:00 UhrEine Anmeldung zur Veranstaltung ist nicht erforderlich, die Veranstaltung findet auf Englisch statt.

http://veranstaltungen.uni-halle.de/veranstaltungen.html?id=25005