Mikael Pittet completed his PhD thesis in Immunology at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and graduated from the University of Lausanne in 2001. He pursued his research at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, United States, where he was named Samana Cay MGH Research Scholar in 2015, Director of the Center for Systems Biology Cancer Immunology Program in 2016, and full Professor at Harvard Medical School in 2019. He joined the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE in 2020where he is appointed Full Professor in the Department of Pathology and Immunology, holding the ISREC Foundation Chair in Onco-Immunology. He is also a member of the Translational Research Centre in Onco-haematology of UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, and a consultant in the Department of Oncology of the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG).

His research laboratory is physically located in Lausanne in the Agora Cancer Research Center, which assembles interdisciplinary research groups to translate advances in cancer research to the clinic. His research focuses on uncovering how the immune system controls cancer and other diseases, and how it can be harnessed for therapy. Pittet’s work has identified how cancers are regulated by various immune cells, including cytotoxic T cells, regulatory T cells, macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils, and dendritic cells. These cells are considered as drug targets in cancer immunotherapy.