Jared Kehe (BLAINEY LAB)

nChip: Screening Synthetic Ecologies

Microbes are diverse and abundant, engaging in sophisticated community-level processes that mirror higher-level multicellular organisms. Our understanding of the rules that govern microbial interactions and the emergence of exploitable properties like pathogen suppression remains nascent. We’re developing a technology called the nChip to rapidly construct thousands of microbial communities. We’ll use the nChip to characterize the prevalence of different modes of interaction and screen for optimal consortia fulfilling criteria of interest.

Beth Pearce (BIRNBAUM LAB)

Examining Tumor-infiltrating T Cell Responses Following Immunotherapy

Checkpoint blockade immunotherapy allows the endogenous anti-tumor immune response to proceed uninhibited but only helps a fraction of patients. To determine what antigens are recognized in successful anti-tumor responses, an improved antigen discovery method is needed. My work aims to develop a better antigen discovery pipeline and use it to interrogate effector T cell responses. For our pipeline we start with activated T cells from tumors, determine the expressed T cell receptors, and find recognized antigens using yeast displayed libraries.