Advancing Immune Phenotyping with USC Zumberge Grant
Karishma Chhugani May 10, 2024
Advancing Immune Phenotyping with USC Zumberge Grant
We are thrilled to announce that our proposal, “Developing reliable and scalable methods for deep immune phenotyping in public transcriptomics databases across diverse populations”, has been selected for funding through the USC Office of Research and Innovation (OORI) Zumberge Preliminary Studies Large Program Award, amounting to $100,000. Co-investigators on this grant include Dr. Matthew Pennell and Dr. Steven Gazal, representing a multidisciplinary collaboration among USC Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Keck School of Medicine in advancing immune phenotyping using innovative bioinformatics tools.
Our project aims to pioneer new bioinformatics approaches for leveraging public transcriptomics data to elucidate critical immune phenotypes such as ancestry, cell-type composition, HLA type, and TCR/BCR repertoires. By utilizing publicly available repositories, we intend to create a comprehensive resource named DeepImmunePheno, which will host the largest collection of RNA-Seq samples annotated with diverse immune phenotypes. The essence of this grant lies in promoting data reusability through secondary analysis, a technique particularly suited to dry labs like the Mangul lab. By leveraging existing data resources and employing sophisticated bioinformatics tools, we can uncover novel biomedical insights without the need for extensive wet lab facilities.
We are excited to embark on this journey and look forward to sharing our discoveries with the broader scientific community. Stay tuned for updates on our progress as we push the boundaries of immune phenotyping through data-driven innovation.