SAB Voices: Pedro Romero on Why Marseille is Becoming a Hub for Translational Immunology
Marseille, June 30, 2026 – Professor Pedro Romero, the chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Marseille Immunology Biocluster, once thought his future lay in nuclear physics.
Growing up in Colombia, he was fascinated by fundamental science and initially imagined a career studying particles and reactors. But there was a practical problem. Colombia didn’t have the infrastructure to support that path.
“There was no particle reactor or anything,” he recalls.
Instead, Romero turned toward medicine, looking for a discipline that could combine scientific rigor with social relevance. After completing his medical training in Bogotá, Romero joined an immunology laboratory developing a malaria vaccine program, where he became immersed in T-cell biology. From then on, he was convinced that immunology was where he belonged.
“My contact with immunology started very early,” he says. “And I knew it was my thing.”
A postdoctoral fellowship at New York University allowed him to continue studying malaria immunology before a visit to the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne shifted his focus toward tumor immunology.
There, as researchers were beginning to understand the role of T cells in cancer, Romero trained in T-cell cloning and functional assays and gradually transitioned into the field that would define the rest of his career.
In Lausanne, Romero has built a career spanning both basic and translational oncology research, particularly in melanoma and other solid tumors, including bladder and head and neck cancers.
“I have been privileged over the years to be able to combine research in well-defined mouse experimental models of tumors, with the ability to set up phase I clinical trials of immunotherapy,” he says.
That focus on connecting fundamental research and clinical application is also what attracted him to MIB.
Marseille’s Translational Ambition
When approached to chair MIB’s Scientific Advisory Board, Romero saw an opportunity to help shape a major translational immunology hub in Europe.
When approached to chair MIB’s Scientific Advisory Board, Romero saw an opportunity to help shape a major translational immunology hub in Europe.
Romero first visited the city in the early 1990s as a postdoctoral researcher, and over the decades, he closely followed the region’s scientific output and became familiar with the strength of its immunology ecosystem.
As a result, he has long viewed Marseille as a place that has produced major contributions to immunology research, and he believes the structure and ambition of MIB arrive at exactly the right moment in the field.
“I think immunology has reached a stage of maturity that provides a robust basis for going to the next stage,” he says.
That next stage, in his view, is translation: bringing together basic researchers, translational scientists, clinicians, hospitals and industry partners into a tightly connected ecosystem where discoveries move rapidly into clinical trials, and clinical observations feed directly back into research.
This is particularly important to Romero because he has already seen what happens when groundbreaking discoveries fail to translate locally.
In the early 1990s, several major immune molecules, including CTLA-4 and IL-17 related discoveries, were identified in Marseille laboratories. Those findings ultimately became foundational to modern cancer immunotherapy and autoimmune disease treatment, yet much of their downstream clinical and industrial development occurred elsewhere.
“MIB is a powerful idea to ensure that substantial immunology discoveries made in the region can also be brought to fruition clinically and industrially here,” he says.
That need for translation is becoming even more urgent as immunology itself grows more complex.
For Romero, one of the most exciting aspects of the field today is the unprecedented depth with which scientists can now observe the immune system. Advances in next-generation sequencing, spatial transcriptomics and systems immunology are giving researchers an increasingly detailed understanding of immune interactions at the cellular and molecular levels.
“We are making fast progress in obtaining a highly granular picture of how the immune system works,” he says.
At the same time, immunology has expanded far beyond its traditional role as a defense system against pathogens. Researchers now understand the immune system as a central regulator of tissue homeostasis, chronic inflammation and cross-organ communication. Immunological mechanisms are increasingly implicated in autoimmune disorders, neurodegenerative diseases and metabolic conditions.
That broader understanding is opening entirely new therapeutic possibilities.
More fundamentally, it is changing how scientists think about disease itself, shifting the perspective from isolated organ-specific disorders to interconnected biological processes in which the immune system plays a central role.
For Romero, immunology is only beginning to show what it can become.
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