SC3: Genomics in the Service of Cancer Immunotherapy
Sunday, April 30
10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Instructor:
Prof. Zoltan Szallasi, M.D., Senior Research Scientist, Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School
COURSE OVERVIEW
The various forms of immunotherapy promise to be the most significant recent breakthrough in cancer therapy. In order to fully take advantage of this therapeutic approach, we will need to understand better several key aspects of antitumor immune response. What are the key players in terms of immune cells? What is the role of HLA presentation and neoepitopes? What is the relative significance of neoepitopes due to mutations, insertions/deletions or ectopically expressed genes? What is the significance of chemotherapy or DNA repair aberration induced mutations in the immune response to cancer? Many of these questions can be addressed by next generation sequencing, such as whole genome, whole exome and RNAseq approaches. This tutorial will discuss these issues through concrete cases.
COURSE OUTLINE
- Relevant principles of cancer immunotherapy - MHC vs non-MHC driven mechanisms
- Computational aspects of basic immunological principles: sequence based HLA calling, predicting epitopes (NetMHC etc.)
- Computational pipelines predicting cancer epitopes from next generation sequencing data
- The impact of DNA repair pathway aberrations, genotoxic therapy, radiation therapy on neoepitope formation
- Genomic analysis of the T-cell receptor repertoire
- Intratumor heterogeneity and cancer immunotherapy
Instructor Biography
Zoltan Szallasi, M.D. is a senior research scientist Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Harvard Medical School and a professor at the Department of Systems Biology at the Technical University of Denmark. He has been active in both the theoretical and experimental aspects of cancer genomics. His lab applied genomics approaches to understand how DNA repair pathway aberrations determine cancer biology, especially in terms of sensitivity to specific therapeutic agents. He is also interested genomic approaches to improve the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy. He has published over 100 papers in molecular biology and bioinformatics. Dr. Szallasi has also been in the forefront of discussing the theoretical limitations of exploiting massively parallel biological measurements. He holds several patents in molecular pharmacology and bioinformatics.