Justin Guinney, PhD, CRI iAtlas Grantee Sage Bionetworks & Institute for Systems Biology Area of Research: All Cancers After former vice president Joe Biden launched his Cancer Moonshot initiative, a team of experts—known as the Blue Ribbon Panel—was formed with the goal of figuring out how to make our efforts against cancer more successful. One of their recommendations was the construction of an “immune atlas” to help advance our knowledge and understanding of immunotherapy in the clinic. To address that recommendation, Drs. Justin Guinney (of Sage Bionetworks) and Ilya Shmulevich (of the Institute for Systems Biology) are developing the CRI iAtlas, an online database and web resource designed to help basic and clinical researchers navigate immunological data across multiple tumor types. Overall, the database will include molecular profiling from over 10,000 tumors across 33 tumor types and will provide rich characterizations of the relationship between tumors and the immune microenvironment and its impact on patient outcomes. Ultimately, insights derived from the CRI iAtlas will be critical to improving the effectiveness of current cancer immunotherapies and developing new immune-based treatment strategies. Projects and Grants The Pan-Cancer Immune Atlas: A resource for exploring tumor-immune interactions from large scale cancer genome studies Sage Bionetworks & Institute for Systems Biology | All Cancers | 2017
