Quantitative Challenges in Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy
November 4-5, 2019
Harvard Medical School Conference Center | Boston, MA
#HarvardPQG19
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Drs. Allison and Honjo for their pioneering discoveries that led to the development of cancer immunotherapy. From the early years of cytokine and monoclonal antibody therapies, to the recent immune checkpoint inhibitors, adoptive cell transfer, and cancer vaccine therapies, cancer immunotherapies have brought paradigm shifts to cancer treatment. Cancer immunology and immuno-oncology research also lead the efforts in early technology development and adoption. Cutting edge high throughput sequencing, genome engineering, single cell genomics, imaging, and proteomics techniques are being applied to cancer immunology and immuno-oncology research and clinical applications. As a result, computational analyses and quantitative modeling have become the critical bottlenecks in understanding tumor immune microenvironment and immunotherapy response. Many important yet challenging questions remain to be answered. What is the immune cell composition in the tumor microenvironment? How do cancer cells and different immune cells interact with each other, and which mutations are immunogenic? How do T cell receptors and B cell receptors recognize tumor antigens? How to predict patient response to immunotherapies? Are there new drug targets to improve immunotherapy response? The 2019 Conference of the Program in Quantitative Genomics will focus on the computational algorithms, quantitative models, as well as data integration techniques that are under active development to answer these important questions.
The conference will be centered on the following three topics:
SESSION I: Tumor immune deconvolution and single cell analyses
SESSION II: Regulators and biomarkers of immunotherapy response
SESSION III: Neoantigen prediction and immune repertoire modeling
Keynote Speakers:
Nir Hacohen Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Broad Institute
Antoni Ribas University of California, Los Angeles
Fabian Theis Helmholtz Zentrum München
Distinguished Speakers:
Michael Angelo Stanford University
Maksym Artyomov Washington University School of Medicine
Phil Bradley Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Benjamin Greenbaum Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Christina Leslie Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Aaron Newman Stanford University
Morten Nielsen Technical University of Denmark
Paul Thomas St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Benjamin Vincent UNC Chapel Hill
Featuring a panel discussion: “Cancer Immunology – The Next 10 Years”
Panelists:
Ana Anderson Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Laurie Glimcher Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
Xiaole Shirley Liu Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health
Ilya Shmulevich Institute for Systems Biology
The conference program includes time for scientific presentations and a poster session and reception for submitted abstracts. Please visit the conference website for more details.
Registration + travel awards will be provided to support junior researchers who submit abstracts.
*Three abstracts will be selected to be presented as 10-minute platform talks
