Mirjana completed her PhD in Computational at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria, where she investigated the process of clonal evolution of cancer under immunosurveillance and how the immune system shapes tumour progression. For her postdoctoral research, she joined the Teichmann Lab (Wellcome Sanger Institute) where I co-led the development of the first human atlas of the maternal-fetal interface in early pregnancy using single cell transcriptomics. She also developed a cell-cell communication statistical framework CellPhoneDB for predicting enriched receptor-ligand pairs between the different cell types and inference of cellular communication networks. This framework allowed Mirjana to dissect the complex interplay between stromal and immune cells in the dynamic tumour microenvironment of a mouse melanoma model.

In May 2020, she started her own lab at Barts Cancer Institute in London. The team are interested in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that promote cancer cell plasticity and adaptation of tumour cells in metastatic niches and under therapeutic pressure, by using analyses of the cancer cell states and the tumour microenvironment in human samples and patient-derived organoids, in conjunction with single-cell omics, imaging and computational analyses.