Expertise from award-winning computational biologist, human immunologist and engineer with experience from Yale, NIH, and NIAID will help advance ImmunoScape’s machine learning capabilities
ImmunoScape, a biotechnology company focused on next-generation immunotherapies, announced the appointment of John Tsang, Ph.D. to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Dr. Tsang joins a distinguished group of leading scientists in immunology and oncology who help to guide ImmunoScape’s scientific strategy.
Dr. Tsang is currently Professor of Immunobiology and Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. He is the founding Director of the Yale Center for Systems and Engineering Immunology (CSEI), which serves as a home and cross-departmental center of research for systems, quantitative, and synthetic immunology at Yale. He is also the Yale lead and Executive Committee member of the recently announced Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York, a landmark collaboration between Columbia, Rockefeller, and Yale Universities with long-term support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to bioengineer immune cells for early disease detection and prevention. Prior to joining Yale, he was a tenured Senior Investigator in the National Institutes of Health’s Intramural Research Program and led a laboratory focusing on systems and quantitative immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) where he remains an Adjunct Investigator. Dr. Tsang was also the Co-Director of the Trans-NIH Center for Human Immunology (CHI) and led its research program in systems human immunology.
“Our team is thrilled that he has joined our Scientific Advisory Board, as his deep expertise across immunology and computational and systems biology will be invaluable as we continue to push the machine learning capabilities of our platform forward,” said Choon-Peng Ng, co-founder and CEO, ImmunoScape. “Alongside the other distinguished advisory board members, Dr. Tsang will be able to directly advise our computational biology leaders, provide unique research perspectives, and guide our strategic scientific and technological direction.”
Dr. Tsang’s expertise directly aligns with ImmunoScape’s goal to utilize its machine learning capabilities to build its TCR discovery pipeline as the company extends into the oncology field. ImmunoScape’s discovery engine offers 360-degree views of lab-validated data from millions of T cells, which serves as the foundation for its machine learning platform. By identifying the characteristics of tumor-reactive TCRs across hundreds of solid tumor targets and multiple HLA alleles, ImmunoScape aims to leverage deep T-cell profiles, linking TCR sequence, phenotypes and antigen information to unlock the faster discovery of novel and efficacious TCR-based therapies across a variety of tumor indications. These capabilities were recently highlighted in new peer-reviewed research ImmunoScape published in Cell Reports.
Dr. Tsang has won multiple awards for his research, including several NIH/NIAID Merit Awards recognizing his scientific leadership in systems immunology, COVID-19, and human immunology research. His work on human immune variability, systems immunology, and prediction of vaccination responses was selected as a Top NIAID Research Advance of 2014. Tsang has served as an advisor on systems immunology and computational biology for numerous programs and organizations, including the Allen Institute, World Allergy Organization, National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Dr. Tsang earned his Ph.D. in biophysics and systems biology from Harvard University and trained in computer engineering (BASc) and computer science (MMath) at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
“I am inspired by ImmunoScape’s mission to harness the power of machine learning and deep immune profiling to accelerate discovery and eventually expand access to more effective therapeutics for cancer,” said Dr. John Tsang. “I look forward to working closely with the team to further advance their powerful machine learning and discovery platform that could help transform the development of more effective, novel therapeutics for solid tumors.”
The other members of the ImmunoScape SAB include Evan Newell, Ph.D., (chairman), Philip Greenberg, M.D., Paul Thomas, Ph.D., Patrick Reeves, Ph.D., Rachel Humphrey, M.D., and Adrian Woolfson, Ph.D.
SOURCE: BusinessWire
