 Immunotherapy is a buzzword and you may have read about this in popular press and there's been some really exciting developments in the treatment of lung cancer and skin cancer melanoma but it hasn't fared so well in breast cancer so one of the things that keeps me up at night time is trying to understand why not why is it why aren't the immune cells which we know are found in breast cancers why aren't they doing their job and killing the cancer cells what is it about the cancer cells that somehow tricks the immune cells into not attacking them. I'm really grateful and excited by Stand Up to Cancer for setting up a really novel and innovative approach to combating cancer. So what is in tumor microenvironment? It's a collection of different kinds of cells the tumor cells, the cancer cells, the immune cells and the surrounding cells of the tissue. So what we're doing in our research team is try to understand the complex communication and crosstalk between all these different kinds of cells in a growing tumor and maybe interrupt the communication between these kinds of cells and hopefully lead to better treatment of breast cancer. By bringing together research teams consisting of doctors, engineers, physicists and mathematicians, scientists who wouldn't normally talk to each other or collaborate with each other we can combine the expertise in different disciplines and come up with novel scientific solutions to understanding and treating cancer.