Browsing by Author "Erkkilä, Fanny"

The immune system recognizes foreign entities in the body and induces protective responses. Sometimes, the immune system does not work optimally, which can lead to different clinical manifestations, one of which is cancer. T cells are a part of the immune system and has the ability to recognize and eliminate the body’s own cells that have transformed into cancer cells. In the field of immuno-oncology, a vast body of research is focusing on understanding the relationship between cancer and the immune system, as well as developing strategies to eliminate cancer by utilizing the immune system. The rise of computational approaches, that can analyze large amounts of data from single-cell sequencing techniques, have enabled the field to conduct research on a new level of complexity. However, this powerful tool has not yet reached its full potential, one major challenge is the lack of functional data of T-cell receptor recognition. In this thesis, we are focusing on the T-cell receptor mediated therapies against cancer, and work toward setting up a screen that assesses T-cell receptor specificity and functionality, which is a powerful tool to acquire knowledge of T-cell biology and improve immunotherapies. One can postulate that the functional data produced by functional screens could be used to train prediction algorithms to a degree, where we could predict the specificity of a TCR based on raw sequencing data.