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Innovative Research Talk with Dinler Amaral Antunes

Thursday, March 20, 2025

10:00 am - 11:00 am


Dinler Amaral Antunes will discuss the results of his pilot project, “Improving the Design of Immunotherapies.”

Many patients face significant challenges benefiting from cancer immunotherapies. Current treatments rely on sequence-based HLA-binding algorithms, which are often optimized for majority HLA alleles and do not adequately account for the genetic variation in varied groups. This pilot research study employs innovative structure-based and AI-enhanced methods to more accurately predict peptide-HLA interactions, stability, and immunogenicity. By focusing on designing high-quality altered peptide ligands (APLs) tailored for HLA profiles of patients—and by assessing off-target toxicity risks—we aim to overcome these technical barriers.

About the Speaker
Dinler Amaral Antunes, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Houston College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. He leads a research group that specializes in structural bioinformatics, utilizing advanced computational techniques such as molecular modeling and docking to explore protein-ligand interactions with biomedical applications. By integrating structural bioinformatics with high-throughput molecular biology and proteomics, Antunes is working to improve the safety and efficacy of immunotherapies for multiple types of cancer.

Dinler Amaral Antunes IRT Thumbnail
Location
Online
Cost
Free