Hashem Koohy: Decoding T cell recognition: Unravelling the intricacies of adaptive T cell immunity

North West Seminar Series of Mathematical Biology and Data Science Monday, 27th November 2023 (hosted by Mudassar Iqbal) https://northwestseminars.great-site.net Abstract: T cells play a pivotal role in cellular immunity, effectively identifying and eliminating infected or aberrant cells. The initiation of T cell response hinges on the recognition of specific antigens presented by MHC or other similar molecules on target cells. Despite its significance, the underlying principles governing the interaction remains incompletely understood, posing a considerable challenge in mapping T cell-antigen landscape. I will start by elucidating a number of obstacles that hinder progress in accurately mapping T cells to their target antigens. Computational modelling of T cell cross-reactivity and prediction of immunogenic T cell epitopes are notably complex tasks that will be discussed in more details, and several issues associated with poor performance of existing models will be presented. I will then introduce a new deep neural network model that we have developed to address these issues. I will finally illustrate how this strategy is used to model the dynamics of the response of CD8 T cells to emerging SARS-CoV-2 mutant variants.