Team MATCHMAKERS makes progress at the Cancer Grand Challenges Summit
The Cancer Grand Challenges is a global initiative funded by the Cancer Foundation UK, the National Cancer Institute, and The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research that “identifies the toughest challenges in cancer research”, awarding up to $25 million dollars for research teams to take them on.
Team MATCHMAKERS, which uses AI to develop more personalized and effective immunotherapies, was one of three teams awarded in 2024 and invited to attend the Cancer Grand Challenges Summit from March 6-7, 2025 to share their research progress with fellow awardees and other cancer researchers.
The MATCHMAKERS are led by Michael Birnbaum, PhD at MIT with the following co-investigators:
David Baker, PhD
University of Washington, USA
Regina Barzilay, PhD
MIT, USA
Brandon DeKosky, PhD
MIT, USA
Peter Bruno, PhD
University of California San Francisco, USA
Dirk Busch, MD, PhD
Technische Universität München, Germany
Stephen Elledge, PhD
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, USA
Christopher Garcia, PhD
Stanford University, USA
Johanna Olweus, MD, PhD
University of Oslo, Norway
Sergio Quezada, PhD
University College London, United Kingdom
Ton Schumacher, PhD
Netherlands Cancer Institute, The Netherlands
Nikolaos Sgourakis, PhD
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, USA
Each co-investigator is responsible for managing different aspects of the research project. For MIT Jameel Clinic AI faculty lead Regina Barzilay, her role was to lead the AI-driven portion, and presented on her work in building AI tools like Boltz-1 (the open source equivalent of AlphaFold3) to predict antigen recognition by different T cell receptors using the data produced by her fellow co-investigators.
“The first thing we need to do is to create the right training datasets and test datasets to understand where we are,” Barzilay said during the Q&A portion of the MATCHMAKERS panel. “The hint of the structure and how it helps is a positive development and I do believe that adding more biological intuition culturing some of the insights from the talks that we’ve had and others would be very fruitful.”
