Peng Jiang, Ph.D., Technology Impact Award Grantee National Cancer Institute

Cellular immunotherapy is a new form of anticancer treatment that engineers T cells to kill tumors that has achieved successes in treating blood cancers. However, cell therapies in solid tumors suffer from therapy resistance because many factors in tumors may inhibit T cell function. Dr. Jiang’s project will combine artificial intelligence (AI) and functional genomics approaches to potentiate cell therapies in solid tumors. He will first establish a deep-neural network to predict multiple states associated with the antitumor efficacy of T cells. Moreover, he will leverage feature selection methods on the neural network to identify hallmark genes of T cell antitumor functions. Secondly he will conduct CRISPR pool screens on AI-prioritized genes to identify gene knockouts in T cells that potentiate the antitumor efficacy, measured as T cell accumulation in mouse tumors and marker proteins associated with the T cell antitumor efficacy. The deliverables will be therapeutic gene targets to potentiate cell therapies in solid tumors, biomarkers to screen patients before treatment, and an AI framework for researchers to analyze their T cell biology data.

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