Anna Hoekstra

I study the metabolism of different T cell subsets in order to find targets to manipulate the immune balance in cancer and auto-immune diseases. Upon activation, T cells must proliferate extremely fast and this places unique demands on their metabolism. However, whereas proliferation of conventional T cells is fully depending on the mTORC1 pathway, regulatory T cell proliferation is not. My goal is to investigate these differences in metabolism between conventional and regulatory T cells using mass spectrometry based metabolomics and to find metabolic targets for therapeutic intervention that can selectively modulate T cell activity.