Sergio Quezada and team MATCHMAKERS selected for Cancer Grand Challenges funding

UCL's Sergio Quezada (Professor of Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy), joins researchers from nine global institutions to form team MATCHMAKERS. The team, led by Dr Michael Birnbaum (MIT), will take advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence to develop tools for personalized immunotherapies for cancer patients. Cancer immunotherapies, which recruit the patient’s own immune system against the disease, have transformed treatment for some cancers, but not for all types and not for all patients. 

T cells are one target for immunotherapies because of their central role in the immune response. These immune cells use receptors on their surface to recognize protein fragments called antigens on cancer cells. Once T cells attach to cancer antigens, they mark them for destruction by the immune system. However, T cell receptors are exceptionally diverse within one person’s immune system and from person to person, making it difficult to predict how any one cancer patient will respond to an immunotherapy.

Team MATCHMAKERS will collect data on T cell receptors and the different antigens they target and build computer models to predict antigen recognition by different T cell receptors. The team’s overarching goal is to develop tools for predicting T cell recognition with simple clinical lab tests and designing antigen-specific immunotherapies. “If successful, what we learn on our team could help transform prediction of T cell receptor recognition from something that is only possible in a few sophisticated laboratories in the world, for a few people at a time, into a routine process,” says Dr Birnbaum. 

"We are extremely proud and honoured to be part of the incredible MATCHMAKERS team with the challenge to decipher the T-cell receptor cancer-recognition code. Our global team will be pooling our cancer immunology and structural biology knowledge, computer science expertise and high-throughput method development to understand and predict how T cells recognise tumours. This grand challenge has huge potential to impact personalised immunotherapies and inform the development of novel therapeutics for cancer. We're very excited to get started," say Prof Quezada

Set up by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the US (part of the National Institutes of Health), Cancer Grand Challenges aims to drive progress against major research and treatment hurdles, by setting ‘challenges’ and bringing diverse, international teams together to think differently. The five winning Cancer Grand Challenges 2024 teams will receive up to $25m each over five years to tackle some of cancer's toughest challenges: Cancer inequities, Early-onset cancers, Solid tumours in children and T-cell receptors. 

Further information

• Cancer Grand Challenges
• Sergio Quezada academic profile
• Michael Birnbaum academic profile (MIT) 
• UCL News: UCL researchers receive £12m from Cancer Grand Challenges