The T-cell Antigen Map Project is a partnership between Microsoft and Adaptive Biotechnologies that aims to map T-cells to antigens to diagnose and treat disease. The basis of the approach is decoding T-cell specificity. As the central component of the adaptive immune system, T-cells play a critical role in mediating health and disease, actively controlling cancers and pathogens, and causing autoimmune disorders when they attack healthy human cells. The antigen specificity of each individual T-cell is determined by its T-cell Receptor (TCR), with adaptive immunity collectively achieved through the selective expansion of T-cells after they bind their cognate antigens. These expanded, antigen-specific T-cells circulate in the blood, making their TCRs accessible to high throughput DNA sequencing. If we could decode the specificities of those circulating TCRs, we could diagnose a plethora of diseases and could engineer T-cells to target individual cancers. Over the past year and a half, we have focused on building capacity in both data generation and analysis. To date, we have sequenced the TCR repertoires of over 10,000 individuals, and have mapped over 400,000 TCRs to thousands of disease-associated antigens, which has enabled the development of new machine learning approaches to associating TCRs with antigens and disease.

This is a highly collaborative project, involving scientists, researchers and engineers from Adaptive and Microsoft. In this talk I will provide an overview of the partnership and the project, and describe some early results.