Instructor in Investigation Cancer Center, Mass General Research Institute

Instructor in Medicine Harvard Medical School

baculoviridae; dna, circular; matrix attachment regions; recombinases; transgenes While cancer immunology has been deeply studied in animal models, there remain many open questions in human tumor immunology due to lack of tools to investigate human samples. We have developed genetic and genomics approaches to explain the large variance in anti-tumor immunity across people, and to discover how tumors evolve to resist productive immunity. We recently found that one of the best predictors of anti-tumor immunity is the load of neoantigens (mutated peptides presented on the surface of tumor cells on HLA molecules, Blood 2014); we also identified somatic mutations in tumors that induce or resist anti-tumor immunity in patients (Rooney et al., Cell 2015). We have also developed new methods to predict somatic mutations that generate presented antigens (Abelin et al, Immunity 2017). These studies have been leading to novel therapeutic approaches and targets for immunotherapy. In particular, based on the finding that patients develop immunity against mutated neoantigens derived from their tumors (Hacohen et al., Cancer Immunology 2013; Rajasagi et al., Blood 2014), we have developed and tested a personal tumor vaccine targeting multiple HLA-associated neoantigens in human tumors (together with Dr. Catherine Wu at DFCI, Ott et al., Nature 2017).