Hugh Y
- Research Program Mentor
MD/PhD Doctor of Medicine and of Philosophy candidate
Expertise
Machine learning for clinical applications, Protein engineering, Immunoengineering, Cancer immunotherapy, Medicine, Biology, Computer Science
Project ideas
Predicting protein-based drugs efficacy on treating lung/breast cancer.
In recent years, there has been an explosion in the development of protein-based drugs. Many of these drugs have been designed to target cancer cells by inhibiting proteins necessary for cancer cells to proliferate. While current protein-based drugs for cancer has significantly improved patient's prognosis, these drugs remain challenging to design. Over the last few years, publicly available data on drug efficacy on several different targets has been accumulating. Using this data, one could analyze patterns that make certain drugs more effective than other drugs and even predict drug efficacy based on structural and chemical properties of these drugs.
Predicting co-viral infection in SARS-CoV-2 patients and the outcomes of coinfection
While we now have relatively fast diagnostic tests to determine if a patient has COVID-19 or not, patients testing positive may also have another viral infection that may have similar symptoms to COVID-19 and thus may not be detected. An example of this is a patient with both a COVID-19 and a influenza infection. Such coinfections may lead to worst symptoms outcomes and patients may need additional care. As such, it would be useful to have a model to predict if a patient is likely to have a coinfection (and if so, what virus?), and to study the impact of such co-infection. This would allow physicians to allocate different levels and types of resources in order to improve outcomes and the severity of symptoms.
Curating recent advancements of CAR-T therapy.
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies has significantly improved outcomes in cancer patients. Over the last several years, there has been many variations of CAR-T therapy, such as armored CAR-T therapy, dual CAR-T therapy, self-destruct CAR-T therapy, etc. Additionally, CAR-T therapy has been applied to other diseases. It would be very impactful to curate these different variations, the pros/cons of each variant, and the use case of each of these variants.