Peter Bruno

Synthetic biology to enable antigen presentation screening across diseases

Abstract:

Antigen presentation shapes how the immune system recognizes self, infected cells, or cancer cells, yet our ability to systematically interrogate this process remains limited. In this seminar, I will describe how we are using synthetic biology to build scalable, cell-based platforms for directly screening peptide-MHC display, focusing on EpiScan, a functional genomics approach for identifying presented antigens in defined cellular and genetic contexts. I will highlight applications spanning viral infection, drug hypersensitivity, and cancer, illustrating how our novel screening platforms can reveal rules that are missed by prediction or mass spectrometry alone.

Speaker: Peter Bruno, University of California, San Francisco

Peter Bruno is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urology and a member of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco. There, he holds the Helen Diller Family Chair in Basic Research in Urologic Cancer.

Peter and his team use synthetic biology and high-throughput functional genetic screens to expand our ability to interrogate and manipulate the immune system. Our new tools for understanding antigen presentation and T-cell recognition are being applied to cancer and other diseases with the goal of developing new immunotherapies and better implementing existing ones.

Seminars start at 4:00 pm, and refreshments will be served at 3:45 pm. All seminars are held in the 2136 Physical Sciences Complex (#415) unless otherwise noted.