Humans and other mammals have co-evolved with complex populations of microbes that constitute the microbiome. Microbes colonize mucosal surfaces, particularly of the gut, but are recently also found within organs, especially as intratumoral bacteria. The microbiome can influence many physiologic processes including metabolism and immunity, and changes in the microbiome composition can facilitate the development of disease or alter the efficacy of medical treatments. The Stein-Thoeringer laboratory studies interactions between pathogenic and beneficial bacteria within the gut microbiome and their mammalian hosts. Our laboratory’s research focuses on a wide range of commensal microbes and their metabolites to explore their effect on immune cell regulation, gut mucosal homeostasis, metabolism and tumor development. We are using in vitro culture systems and laboratory mouse models of experimental microbiome modulations, e.g., antibiotics, diet and gnotobiotics. We are sequencing and analyzing the microbiome from the gastrointestinal tract as well as low-biomass microbiomes from tumour tissue and combine various data-sets to achieve multi-omics phenotype characterizations. Our laboratory has performed several clinical microbiome studies or collaborated with clinical groups to study the role of the gut microbiome in medical conditions or in therapy outcomes.
Translational Microbiome Sciences
Biosketch
Prof. Dr. med. univ. Christoph Stein-Thoeringer is Professor for Infectious Diseases and Translational Microbiome Research at the University Hospital Tübingen, Internal Medicine I, since July 2022.
He studied medicine at the University of Zurich and at the University of Graz, where he completed his MD in 2005. He then spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow and resident in psychiatry and neurology at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, before becoming a resident physician and research group leader at the Technical University of Munich, where he worked on gut-brain axis, inflammatory and functional bowel diseases with a focus on the microbiome. As a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York, he continued and intensified his research on the gut microbiome and cancer immunotherapies from 2016 to 2018.
From 2019 until 2022, Christoph Stein-Thoeringer was principal investigator in the Department of Microbiome and Cancer at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, and worked as a senior physician at the Department of Medical Oncology, National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg and a member of the NCT's extended directorate. Since 2022, Christoph Stein-Thoeringer is attending physician and scientist overseeing the infectious disease branch at the Department of Internal Medicine I, the DZIF Clinical Research Unit and the Translational Microbiome Research lab at the University Hospital Tübingen and the M3 Institute.
Team
Selected publications
- Stein-Thoeringer CK, Saini NY, Zamir E, Blumenberg V, Schubert ML, Mor U, Fante MA, Schmidt S, Hayase E, Hayase T, Rohrbach R, Chang CC, McDaniel L, Flores I, Gaiser R, Edinger M, Wolff D, Heidenreich M, Strati P, Nair R, Chihara D, Fayad LE, Ahmed S, Iyer SP, Steiner RE, Jain P, Nastoupil LJ, Westin J, Arora R, Wang ML, Turner J, Menges M, Hidalgo-Vargas M, Reid K, Dreger P, Schmitt A, Müller-Tidow C, Locke FL, Davila ML, Champlin RE, Flowers CR, Shpall EJ, Poeck H, Neelapu SS, Schmitt M, Subklewe M, Jain MD, Jenq RR, Elinav E. A non-antibiotic-disrupted gut microbiome is associated with clinical responses to CD19-CAR-T cell cancer immunotherapy. Nat. Med. 2023 Apr;29(4):906-916.
- Fahrmann JF, Saini NY, Chia-Chi C, Irajizad E, Strati P, Nair R, Fayad LE, Ahmed S, Lee HJ, Iyer S, Steiner R, Vykoukal J, Wu R, Dennison JB, Nastoupil L, Jain P, Wang M, Green M, Westin J, Blumenberg V, Davila M, Champlin R, Shpall EJ, Kebriaei P, Flowers CR, Jain M, Jenq R, Stein-Thoeringer CK, Subklewe M, Neelapu SS, Hanash S. A polyamine-centric, blood-based metabolite panel predictive of poor response to CAR-T cell therapy in large B cell lymphoma. Cell Rep Med. 2022 Nov 15;3(11):100720.
- Suez J, Cohen Y, Valdés-Mas R, Mor U, Dori-Bachash M, Federici S, Zmora N, Leshem A, Heinemann M, Linevsky R, Zur M, Ben-Zeev Brik R, Bukimer A, Eliyahu-Miller S, Metz A, Fischbein R, Sharov O, Malitsky S, Itkin M, Stettner N, Harmelin A, Shapiro H, Stein-Thoeringer CK, Segal E, Elinav E. Personalized microbiome-driven effects of non-nutritive sweeteners on human glucose tolerance. Cell. 2022 Sep 1;185(18):3307-3328.e19.
- de Castilhos J, Zamir E, Hippchen T, Rohrbach R, Schmidt S, Hengler S, Schumacher H, Neubauer M, Kunz S, Müller-Esch T, Hiergeist A, Gessner A, Khalid D, Gaiser R, Cullin N, Papagiannarou SM, Beuthien-Baumann B, Krämer A, Bartenschlager R, Jäger D, Müller M, Herth F, Duerschmied D, Schneider J, Schmid RM, Eberhardt JF, Khodamoradi Y, Vehreschild MJGT, Teufel A, Ebert MP, Hau P, Salzberger B, Schnitzler P, Poeck H, Elinav E, Merle U, Stein-Thoeringer CK. Severe Dysbiosis and Specific Haemophilus and Neisseria Signatures as Hallmarks of the Oropharyngeal Microbiome in Critically Ill Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Patients. Clin Infect Dis. 2022 Aug 24;75(1):e1063-e1071.
- Docampo MD, da Silva MB, Lazrak A, Nichols KB, Lieberman SR, Slingerland AE, Armijo GK, Shono Y, Nguyen C, Monette S, Dwomoh E, Lee N, Geary CD, Perobelli SM, Smith M, Markey KA, Vardhana SA, Kousa AI, Zamir E, Greenfield I, Sun JC, Cross JR, Peled JU, Jenq RR, Stein-Thoeringer CK, van den Brink MRM. Alloreactive T cells deficient of the short-chain fatty acid receptor GPR109A induce less graft-versus-host disease. Blood. 2022 Apr 14;139(15):2392-2405.
- Cullin N, Azevedo Antunes C, Straussman R, Stein-Thoeringer CK, Elinav E. Microbiome and cancer. Cancer Cell. 2021 Oct 11;39(10):1317-1341.
- Bajic D, Niemann A, Hillmer AK, Mejias-Luque R, Bluemel S, Docampo M, Funk MC, Tonin E, Boutros M, Schnabl B, Busch DH, Miki T, Schmid RM, van den Brink MRM, Gerhard M, Stein-Thoeringer CK. Gut Microbiota-Derived Propionate Regulates the Expression of Reg3 Mucosal Lectins and Ameliorates Experimental Colitis in Mice. J Crohns Colitis. 2020 Oct 5;14(10):1462-1472.
- Peled JU, Gomes ALC, Devlin SM, Littmann ER, Taur Y, Sung AD, Weber D, Hashimoto D, Slingerland AE, Slingerland JB, Maloy M, Clurman AG, Stein-Thoeringer CK, Markey KA, Docampo MD, Burgos da Silva M, Khan N, Gessner A, Messina JA, Romero K, Lew MV, Bush A, Bohannon L, Brereton DG, Fontana E, Amoretti LA, Wright RJ, Armijo GK, Shono Y, Sanchez-Escamilla M, Castillo Flores N, Alarcon Tomas A, Lin RJ, Yáñez San Segundo L, Shah GL, Cho C, Scordo M, Politikos I, Hayasaka K, Hasegawa Y, Gyurkocza B, Ponce DM, Barker JN, Perales MA, Giralt SA, Jenq RR, Teshima T, Chao NJ, Holler E, Xavier JB, Pamer EG, van den Brink MRM. Microbiota as Predictor of Mortality in Allogeneic Hematopoietic-Cell Transplantation. N Engl J Med. 2020 Feb 27;382(9):822-834.
- Stein-Thoeringer CK, Nichols KB, Lazrak A, Docampo MD, Slingerland AE, Slingerland JB, Clurman AG, Armijo G, Gomes ALC, Shono Y, Staffas A, Burgos da Silva M, Devlin SM, Markey KA, Bajic D, Pinedo R, Tsakmaklis A, Littmann ER, Pastore A, Taur Y, Monette S, Arcila ME, Pickard AJ, Maloy M, Wright RJ, Amoretti LA, Fontana E, Pham D, Jamal MA, Weber D, Sung AD, Hashimoto D, Scheid C, Xavier JB, Messina JA, Romero K, Lew M, Bush A, Bohannon L, Hayasaka K, Hasegawa Y, Vehreschild MJGT, Cross JR, Ponce DM, Perales MA, Giralt SA, Jenq RR, Teshima T, Holler E, Chao NJ, Pamer EG, Peled JU, van den Brink MRM. Lactose drives Enterococcus expansion to promote graft-versus-host disease. Science. 2019 Nov 29;366(6469):1143-1149.
- Staffas A, Burgos da Silva M, Slingerland AE, Lazrak A, Bare CJ, Holman CD, Docampo MD, Shono Y, Durham B, Pickard AJ, Cross JR, Stein-Thoeringer C, Velardi E, Tsai JJ, Jahn L, Jay H, Lieberman S, Smith OM, Pamer EG, Peled JU, Cohen DE, Jenq RR, van den Brink MRM. Nutritional Support from the Intestinal Microbiota Improves Hematopoietic Reconstitution after Bone Marrow Transplantation in Mice. Cell Host Microbe. 2018 Apr 11;23(4):447-457.e4.