2019 PQG Conference

2019 PQG BannerQuantitative Challenges in Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy

The Program in Quantitative Genomics will host its 13th annual conference, “Quantitative Challenges in Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy” on November 4-5, 2019 at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA.

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 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 PQG conference will focus on the computational algorithms, quantitative models, as well as data integration techniques that are under active development to answer these important questions.

Specifically, 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


Seating is limited, so we encourage you to register early for this event.
We highly encourage abstract submissions and participation of all researchers, especially junior researchers, for posters and possible platform presentations. Registration and travel awards will be provided to support junior researchers who submit abstracts. Stellar abstract award winners will be selected. Three of the stellar abstract award winners will be selected to be presented as 10-minute platform talks.

Co-sponsored by:

DF/HCC