The relationship between immune system and cancer is elaborated and dynamic.

Immunotherapy has been acquiring big visibility in recent years and even more in the last months thanks to the 2018 Nobel Prize for medicine (read here). Immunotherapy involves re-engineering T-cells so that they can recognize and kill cancer cells. This type of therapy has shown promising preliminary results in fighting lymphoma.

Microscopy is the elected method to study immune cells interactions and their potential for cancer healing. However, technologies that are available nowadays mainly rely on fluorescence, and fragile primary immune cells are heavily perturbed and eventually killed by staining procedures and phototoxicity.

The research on immune-oncology will greatly benefit from a high-resolution, label-free approach allowing to image immune cells interplays in a marker-free, non-invasive way.

Nanolive’s 3D Cell Explorer opens the door for new observations and for long-term live cell imaging (up to weeks of continuous imaging) with unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution (<200nm; 1img/2sec).