On April 3rd, 2025, Sonia Aristin successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Transcriptional diversity of regulatory T (Treg) cells in colorectal cancer.” Sonia’s research has provided important new insights into how T cells and colorectal cancer (CRC) tumors interact, using innovative in vitro and in vivo models. Her work demonstrates that CRC tumor-derived organoids can directly influence T cell differentiation, promoting the development of immunosuppressive regulatory T cells. Strikingly, she also showed that CRC tumors can systemically affect Treg cell identity in vivo. It has been an real pleasure to work with Sonia during her PhD journey. I’m very proud of her achievements and excited to see where her career will take her next!
A BIG thank you as well to the rest of the supervisory team—Onno Kranenburg, Stefan Prekovic, and Enric Mocholi—and importantly to Worldwide Cancer Research for funding this important fundamental work.