Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab

Multi-PI lab at UNC Chapel Hill working on novel cancer immunotherapies targeting mutant antigens.

Tweets by @iskander & @benjamingvincen

[dhuv.io @DhuviKarthikey1]

Don’t stop pretraining! Or something like that…

Excited to be presenting work from @pirl_unc at #MLCB2023. If you’re interested in learning about how a model for few-shot facial recognition from 2015 can help encode semantic similarity between Tcell epitopes, stop by poster143!

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

@NP_Rudqvist presenting on HPV specific TCRs, lots of cool, interesting, unexpected results (high level of E1 specificity, ability of cancers to lose E7 expression, &c)

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Really fascinating talk by Aude Chapuis showing escape from WT1 specific immune pressure by AML through switching proteasome sub-unit expression

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Jenny Jiang presenting on the sequence diversity of TCRs for conserved SARS-CoV-2 T-cell epitopes at the UNC TCR Discovery Symposium

[Kelly Olsen, PhD @KOmudphud]

Thank you to everyone for your support over the years- I am officially PhDone!!!!

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Congratulations to Dr. @KOimmuno on successfully defending her PhD!

It’s been wonderful having you as a part of PIRL and we're excited to see what you do next!

[alex rubinsteyn @iskander]

We have taken a deep interest in NUT carcinoma at @pirl_unc and have a few ideas for how it could be treated (eg therapeutic vaccination targeting NUTM1)

Looking for a staff molecular biologist (ideally immunologist) to do some of the preclinical work:

https://t.co/7JiR1P50fn

[Kelly Olsen, PhD @KOmudphud]

Thrilled to announce that our new paper is out at @BloodAdvances now! Please check out our work on shared minor histocompatibility antigens, including discovery of 24 novel shared mHAs! Done with @BenjaminGVincen and Paul Armistead, with @laraesucheston 🧵https://t.co/u62xZmpIRF

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Another blog post by @iam_js_lee diving deeper into using Rust to speed up Python bioinformatics code (using some recommendations from @michaellazear and @nomad421 to go 3x faster than our best previous implementation)

[Jin Seok (Andy) Lee @iam_js_lee]

Here is an update to my recent blog post. Thanks to @michaellazear and @nomad421, the Rust+Python implementation is now 10x faster than the pure Python equivalent for k-mer counting.

https://t.co/y1s5QeSBDb

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

New post by Jin Seok (Andy) Lee:

Shaking the Rust Off Python
https://t.co/8vKQJ3Lec0

He tries to speed up parallel nucleotide kmer counting by moving the inner loop from Python to Rust and finds it surprisingly difficult to get more than 3x faster

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

New blog post!

"Adventures in mRNA lipid nanoparticle formulation"

https://t.co/2dNdkrU2vy

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Blog post by @DhuviKarthikey1:

"Defining Immunogenicity for Immunogenicity Prediction"

https://t.co/qNUVwbiCnU

[dhuv.io @DhuviKarthikey1]

@iskander and @BenjaminGVincen speaking on the vision of @pirl_unc: closing the loop on in-silico therapeutic design, in-vitro validation, and translational trials for #personalizedmedicine #immunotherapy

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Seminar at @UNC_Lineberger by Dr. Chris French about NUT carcinoma, which is an under-studied cancer our lab has recently taken significant interest in.

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Next #pirlsymposium panel talking about predicting T-cell responses to peptide/MHC pairs

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Next #pirlsymposium panel on overcoming limits of neoantigen vaccination

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Second day of #pirlsymposium

Panel on high throughput T-cell assays

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Presentation by Dhuvi Karthikeyan @DhuviKarthikey1 on immunogenicity prediction

Lots of models based on either antigen sequence and/or structure, unclear if any of them out-perform just peptide-MHC affinity in predicting T-cell responses.

#pirlsymposium

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Dan Van Twisk presenting his work comparing different methods for identifying gene fusions

[Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab @pirl_unc]

Dante Bortone presenting a massive reanalysis of different published RNA based predictors of response to checkpoint blockade

tl;dr the situation is pretty bad