Our immune systems use specialized and highly variable sets of adaptive immune proteins - antibodies and T cell receptors – to provide targeted protection and memory against foreign agents. Current methods to discover new immune drugs and to explore the vast diversity of adaptive immune proteins are generally limited in either quality or throughput. These limitations of current screening technologies make protein drug discovery and engineering time-consuming, expensive, and risky. To address these bottlenecks, we have established a suite of new high-throughput functional screening platforms for antibodies and T cell receptors. We will share examples of these technologies in diverse settings to explore basic aspects of immune receptor recognition, study the mechanisms that underpin protective human immunity, and to improve immune drug discovery.
Dr. Brandon DeKosky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT and a Core Member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, Harvard, and MIT. Research efforts at the DeKosky lab have developed a suite of high-throughput single-cell platforms for large-scale analyses of adaptive immunity. These studies are advancing new approaches in biologic drug discovery, and are cataloguing the vast genetic and functional diversity of adaptive immune cells across disease settings. Key application areas include infectious disease interventions, especially malaria and HIV-1 prevention, and the development of personalized cancer therapies.
Dr. DeKosky has been awarded several honors for his research program. His Ph.D. research was supported by a Hertz Foundation Fellowship and an NSF Graduate Fellowship. DeKosky was also awarded a K99 Pathway to Independence Award and an NIH Early Independence Award. More recently he received a Department of Defense Career Development Award, the James S. Huston Antibody Science Talent Award, the Amgen Young Investigator Award, and the American Association of Immunologists ASPIRE award.