Dr. Frederike Bensch

Frederike Bensch is a pulmonologist with a strong focus on thoracic oncology and translational research. She combines clinical expertise in advanced bronchoscopy with a background in molecular imaging and biomarker-driven clinical trials. Her work bridges fundamental insights into drug–tumor interactions with innovative, minimally invasive approaches to improve diagnosis, treatment selection, and outcomes for patients with lung cancer.

Her research line originates from her PhD training in molecular imaging in Medical Oncology, where she led first-in-human and multicenter clinical trials investigating antibody pharmacokinetics and target accessibility in cancer.

As an independent clinician-scientist, she initiated the DEFLECT program, developing fluorescence molecular bronchoscopy as a novel tool to improve pulmonary nodule detection and to study tumor and lung microenvironment characteristics in vivo. Building on this, she will start PulmoPrint in 2026, a translational research program focused on unresectable stage III non-small cell lung cancer. PulmoPrint integrates in-vivo fluorescence imaging of immunotherapy drugs during bronchoscopy with deep immune and molecular profiling to understand why curative-intent chemoradiotherapy and immunotherapy fail in many patients.

Through DEFLECT and PulmoPrint, she aims to identify actionable biomarkers of drug delivery and immune competence, and to lay the groundwork for future strategies such as treatment de-escalation, therapy re-arrangement, and image-guided local drug delivery. Her work is characterized by strong interdisciplinary collaboration across pulmonology, oncology, imaging sciences, pathology, and computational biology, with the overarching goal of advancing precision medicine in lung cancer.