Tumour immunology & microenvironment
MODULATE Clinical Trial
A multi-site trial testing whether reshaping the tumour's immune environment can make anti-PD-1 immunotherapy work for more patients.
The immune system holds the key to controlling cancer — but the environment built around a tumour can lock that system out. The MODULATE trial is a multi-site clinical study I lead as lead scientist, investigating whether combining targeted modulation of the tumour microenvironment (TME) with anti-PD-1 checkpoint immunotherapy can reshape the immune landscape in ways that improve patient outcomes.
The trial captures paired samples before and after treatment, enabling the team to track how therapy physically reorganises the tumour — mapping changes in immune-cell infiltration, spatial architecture, and stromal remodelling across time. The central questions are: does the combination shift the immune landscape toward an anti-tumour state, does it alter tumour structure in measurable ways, and do these biological changes predict which patients benefit most?
Building the infrastructure for this trial — a centralised diagnostic pipeline spanning 16 institutions, biopsy logistics, tissue handling protocols, and an AI-based stratification workflow — was as much an exercise in translational systems design as in biology. The scientific questions are only answerable because the operational architecture makes them answerable at scale.
By linking real-time tissue changes to clinical response, MODULATE is designed to generate both actionable biomarkers for patient stratification and mechanistic insight into how the TME constrains — or enables — immunotherapy.
