Dr. Alvaro Lladser, USS academic, principal investigator and director of Centro Ciencia & Vida, of Fundación Ciencia & Vida-Universidad San Sebastián (FCV-USS), carried out an important academic tour of Europe between August and September to present our institution’s advances in immunology and cancer immunotherapy, and to strengthen strategic collaborations with world-class organizations.

The tour began in Vienna, with participation in the 19th International Congress of Immunology (IUIS 2025), the most important global meeting in the discipline. There, Dr. Lladser gave a talk in the symposium Vaccines and immunotherapies for infectious and tumor diseases (ALACI) on immunity against solid tumors, titled “Unveiling the interplay between circulating and tissue-resident T cells underlying effective immunity against solid tumor”.

He then visited the Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde (i3S) in Porto, Portugal, where he consolidated a collaboration agreement signed this year and explored new opportunities for joint projects with European funding.

The agenda continued in the United Kingdom, with presentations at the UCL Cancer Institute (University College London) and at the University of Oxford. In London, he reinforced a long-standing collaboration with Dr. Sergio Quezada, which has already led to high-impact joint publications and the training of advanced human capital. In Oxford, he presented his latest advances in solid-tumor immunology and held key meetings with Dr. Felipe Gálvez-Cancino, a former member of his laboratory in Chile who is now consolidating his academic career at that institution, as well as with other researchers from the Centre for Immuno-Oncology.

Finally, in Paris, he presented at Institut Curie and Institut Cochin, strengthening alliances that have made it possible to organize high-level international courses, open exchange opportunities for students, and gain access to frontier technologies in immunology and cancer immunotherapy.

“The tour of Europe aimed to consolidate and expand Centro Ciencia & Vida’s international collaboration networks. In November we will host Dr. Claudio Sunkel, director of i3S Porto, who will come to officially sign a collaboration agreement that we have established. In addition, in January 2026 we will organize an international course on tissue immunology in Santiago, with the participation of outstanding European researchers who confirmed their attendance during this trip,” explains the director of the ANID center of scientific and technological excellence.

He adds that “we have also secured research stays at Institut Curie for two young people from our center, Dr. Diego Figueroa and Javiera Reyes, a student in the USS PhD Program in Immunology. This is joined by concrete progress toward establishing an institutional agreement with the Centre for Immuno-Oncology at the University of Oxford, which will open new opportunities for training and exchange of advanced human capital.”

In short, the tour allowed us not only to present our advances in immunology, but also to secure alliances, agreements and concrete opportunities for a new generation of Chilean researchers trained under the wing of Centro Ciencia & Vida.”

The tour carried out by Dr. Lladser consolidates the international presence of Centro Ciencia & Vida (FCV-USS) and reinforces its strategic pillars: the generation of frontier knowledge, the training of advanced human capital, and the establishment of global collaboration networks. These activities reflect recognition of the scientific quality developed in Chile and represent an opportunity to project its impact worldwide.