Benjamin Ostendorf

A new tool from Rockefeller's @danmucida.bsky.social and @czbiohub.bsky.social allows scientists to closely follow newly activated T cells as they travel and change during an infection—it may inform future therapies for infection, cancer, and autoimmunity.

🔗: https://bit.ly/3NjZEWD

Thank you, Ariën!

@ostendorflab.org, @immushuang.bsky.social, @sohailtavazoie.bsky.social et al. show that activation of LXRs elicits a T cell "pre-effector" state that enhances priming and promotes anti-tumor immunity. rupress.org/jem/article/...

#TumorImmunology

thank you christian!

Huge thank you to all who contributed to this, particularly @sohailtavazoie.bsky.social , @immushuang.bsky.social, Bsky-less Jonathan Goldstein and all other co-authors. Also thank you to our funders, including @bihatcharite.bsky.social, Deutsche Krebshilfe, @dfg.de, DGIM and others.

Interestingly, we found that LXR activation induces a state in T cells that renders them more receptive to adopting effector states upon activation; this pre-conditioned state is quite fascinating and may be relevant beyond cancer.

Given their highly variable abundance, we now asked whether LXR agonism also works in tumors with low levels of g-MDSCs. This was indeed the case - and the effect was immune-mediated despite only very scarce g-MDSCs.

LXR/ApoE Activation Restricts Innate Immune Suppression in Cancer Therapeutic harnessing of adaptive immunity via checkpoint inhibition has transformed the treatment of many cancers. Despite unprecedented long-term r…

In Sohail's lab, we had previously found that LXR agonism enhances anti-tumor immunity by depleting granulocytic MDSCs.

Liver-X-receptor agonism enhances T cell priming and activation to promote anti-tumor immunity Ostendorf et al. show that activation of liver-X-receptors preconditions T cells to render them more receptive to adopting effector states upon activation.

Delighted to share our new paper on LXR agonism pre-conditioning T cells to more readily adopt effector states, out in @jem.org today. This was a long project started in @sohailtavazoie.bsky.social's lab and completed across the atlantic here in Berlin at Charité.

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin/ Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (d/w/m) /DoktorandIn Teilzeit | 28.02.2026 | Campus Virchow-Klinikum, Wedding

📣 We’re hiring! Pls share!
Join my lab to study human antigen-specific B cells across vaccination & infection backgrounds & explore their plasticity.
Passionate about B cells, cutting-edge immunology, molecular biology & bioinformatics?
📄Details & apply: karriere.charite.de/stellenangeb...
⏳ Feb 28

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.”

Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for
www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

A fascinating finding on the therapeutic potential of targeting non-coding regions of MYC!

Medical breakthroughs in 2025 ... and a happy new year.

New post!

There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost.

Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...

Completely agree! Now I mainly wish for Prism and Flowjo replacements...

Friday Papers Club! 🍿In light of Pubmed going down, the collapse of social media, and my recent success at getting recommendations for interesting papers from those still around, I am starting a new tradition! - Recommend a good scientific manuscript! 👇

For our #flowcytometry peeps, would you like to have a single fix/perm protocol that is optimised for everything? One that preserves fluorophores while allowing simultaneous TF and cytokine staining? How about 100-fold cheaper?

You got it:
currentprotocols.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Balancing off-target and on-target considerations for optimized Cas9 CRISPR knockout library design The continued development of high-dimensional CRISPR screen readouts, such as single-cell RNA sequencing and high-content imaging, necessitates compact libraries to enable functional interrogation at ...

Doomscrolling pause to chat CRISPR libraries! Preprint describes our new, data-driven approach to combine on-target and off-target predictions much more intelligently for *selecting* guides, which we use to develop our newest Cas9 knockout library, Jacquere. Thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Neoadjuvant FOLFIRINOX versus neoadjuvant gemcitabine-based chemoradiotherapy in resectable and borderline resectable pancreatic cancer (PREOPANC-2): a multicentre, open-label, phase 3 randomised tria... This randomised trial did not show a difference in overall survival between neoadjuvant FOLFIRINOX and neoadjuvant gemcitabine-based chemoradiotherapy in patients with resectable or borderline resecta...

Very interesting! The link leads to the ESPAC5 trial though, correct link here www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

What a great thread on budgeting for an academic lab!!

🧨Exciting new pre-print 🧨 Introducing ppmSeq - cost effective, scalable dual-strand 🧬🧬 sequencing. Scalability & ultra-low error in one! A game changer for somatic genome discovery science and cfDNA clinical apps. Check out thread for deets!

Call for 20 Assistant Professor positions Karolinska Institutet is a world-leading medical university with a long and proud history of ground-breaking research. We are now recruiting outstanding early-career researchers with particularly exce...

Karolinska is looking for 20 (!!) assistant professors and offering 6 year appointments with ~1M USD startup packages.

ki.se/en/about-ki/...

It's my first #newPI roll call on BlueSky! Calling all new #cancer PIs who just started or who are about to start their labs! Please say hi and what you work on so I can follow you if I don't already! 😃

Reporter-based screening identifies RAS-RAF mutations as drivers of resistance to active-state RAS inhibitors in colorectal cancer A cell-sorting approach reveals distinct modes of cancer resistance to active-state RAS inhibitors.

Different modes of resistance to RAS inhibitors unveiled by dual Erk reporters that monitor erk activity in the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Cool new paper led by Markus Morkel and Oleksandra Aust www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We're very happy to invite you to the 𝟑𝐫𝐝 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐄𝐦𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟗 &𝟏𝟎.

Visit our website ys2c.org for further information.

junior professorship position (f/m/d) in Single-Cell Systems Biology - Würzburg (Stadt), Bayern (DE) job with Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg - Faculty of Medicine | 673667 The Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg, Faculty of Medicine is offering one junior professorship position (f/m/d) in Single-Cell Systems Biology.

We have an attractive opening for a tenure-track professorship in Single-Cell Systems Biology. Excellent package and infrastructure at @uni-wuerzburg.de Institute of Systems Immunology. Great place to live and work in the heart of the franconian wine region!

jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/673667/j...

Presented at #ASCO25:

The addition of encorafenib and cetuximab to mFOLFOX6 chemotherapy improved outcomes in the primary treatment of metastatic BRAF V600E–mutated colorectal cancer.

Full BREAKWATER phase 3 trial results:

Thanks so much, Veena 🙏🙂!

CRISPR screens in the context of immune selection identify CHD1 and MAP3K7 as mediators of cancer immunotherapy resistance Cancer immunotherapy is only effective in a subset of patients, highlighting the need for effective biomarkers and combination therapies. Here we systematically identify genetic determinants of cancer...

Excited to announce our preprint today @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social
Using functional genomics, we map the genetic determinants cancer cell sensitivity to tumour-reactive T cells:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thank you Yuko! 🙂

Thank you Milo 🙂!