Within our research environment an interdisciplinary team of research groups will elucidate a comprehensive “from molecules to tissue” level understanding of cancer cell biomechanics starting from developing technologies that allow for biomechanical phenotyping of cancer cells to describing the cell and molecular level mechanisms that underlie those biomechanical phenotypes and finally discovering the consequences of cancer biomechanics in in-vivo models and clinical samples. The unifying theme of this research environment is advanced microscopy-based technologies, where microfluidics enabled techniques allow for single cell sorting, characterization and manipulation, and high-resolution and super-resolution “in vivo and in vitro” imaging techniques enable mechanistic multi-scale descriptions. The long-term goal is to form a basis for novel diagnostics and treatment modalities based on the comprehensive understanding of the mechanobiology of cancer.