
Sneha Berry
I work under the mentorship of Drew Pardoll, M.D., Ph.D.; Janis Taube, M.D., M.Sc.; and Alex Szalay, Ph.D.; at the exciting interface of cancer immunology, pathology and data science. The team’s long-term goal is to create carefully curated, open source atlases of different tumors stained for multiple proteins, thus spatially mapping immune activity within the tumor microenvironment. Similar to The Cancer Genome Atlas and Protein Data Bank, we hope that making large data sets along with specialized data analysis tools publicly available will spur discoveries at an unprecedented level in cancer immunotherapy. My thesis work has formed the foundation of this effort. Specifically, I developed an end-to-end platform with meticulous quality control for creating quantitative, spatially resolved multiplex immunofluorescence data using lessons derived from the field of astronomy. Implementation of this platform led to the identification of two previously under-recognized immunoactive cell subsets that are now important biomarker candidates for defining survival after anti-PD-1 therapy in patients with melanoma.