Cancer Grand Challenges recently announced five winning teams for 2024, which included five researchers from MIT: Michael Birnbaum, Regina Barzilay, Brandon DeKosky, Seychelle Vos, and Ömer Yilmaz. Each team is made up of interdisciplinary cancer researchers from across the globe and will likely be awarded $25 million over five years.
Birnbaum, an associate professor within the Department of Biological Engineering, leads Team MATCHMAKERS and is joined by co-investigators Barzilay, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the AI faculty lead on the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health; and DeKosky, Phillip and Susan Ragon Profession Development Professor of Chemical Engineering. All three are also affiliates of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research At MIT.
Team MATCHMAKERS will make the most of recent advances in artificial intelligence to develop tools for personalized immunotherapies for cancer patients. Cancer immunotherapies, which recruit the patient’s own immune system against the disease, have transformed treatment for some cancers, but not for every kind and never for all patients.
T cells are one goal for immunotherapies due to their central role within the immune response. These immune cells use receptors on their surface to acknowledge protein fragments called antigens on cancer cells. Once T cells attach to cancer antigens, they mark them for destruction by the immune system. Nevertheless, T cell receptors are exceptionally diverse inside one person’s immune system and from individual to individual, making it difficult to predict how anybody cancer patient will reply to an immunotherapy.
Team MATCHMAKERS will collect data on T cell receptors and different antigens they aim and construct computer models to predict antigen recognition by different T cell receptors. The team’s overarching goal is to develop tools for predicting T cell recognition with easy clinical lab tests and designing antigen-specific immunotherapies. “If successful, what we learn on our team could help transform prediction of T cell receptor recognition from something that is barely possible in a couple of sophisticated laboratories on the earth, for a couple of people at a time, right into a routine process,” says Birnbaum.
“The MATCHMAKERS project draws on MIT’s long tradition of developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools for the good thing about society,” comments Ryan Schoenfeld, CEO of The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research. “Their approach to optimizing immunotherapy for cancer and plenty of other diseases is exemplary of the form of interdisciplinary research The Mark Foundation prioritizes supporting.” Along with The Mark Foundation, the MATCHMAKERS team is funded by Cancer Research UK and the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
Vos, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Profession Development Professor of Life Sciences and HHMI Freeman Hrabowksi Scholar within the Department of Biology, will likely be a co-investigator on Team KOODAC. The KOODAC team will develop recent treatments for solid tumors in children, using protein degradation strategies to focus on previously “undruggable” drivers of cancers. KOODAC is funded by Cancer Research UK, France’s Institut National Du Cancer, and KiKa (Children Cancer Free Foundation) through Cancer Grand Challenges.
As a co-investigator on team PROSPECT, Yilmaz, who can also be a Koch Institute affiliate, will help address early-onset colorectal cancers, an emerging global problem amongst individuals younger than 50 years. The team seeks to elucidate pathways, risk aspects, and molecules involved within the disease’s development. Team PROSPECT is supported by Cancer Research UK, the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK, and France’s Institut National Du Cancer through Cancer Grand Challenges.