Benjamin Greenbaum, PhD, is assistant professor in the Departments of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology, Oncological Sciences,and Pathology at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai. As part of the Program for Mathematical Genomics Seminar Series, he will deliver the talk, "Quantifying Immunogenicity in Oncology and Virology", followed by a Q+A.

Immune recognition is a critical determinant of pathogen evolution, and avoidance of immune detection is a critical issue for a tumor. The later can in some cases be exploited for cancer immunotherapies. A key mathematical issue that has emerged in both immunology oncology is therefore the extent to which we can quantify the features that make a molecule immunogenic and which of those features can be a fitness determinant either endogenously or under therapy. We will discuss our recent work on this problem where we have learned from the genome evolution of tumors and viruses, and its implications for cancer immunotherapies.