Anna Konstorum, a postdoctoral fellow of Dr. Reinhard Laubenbacher’s research group at Center for Quantitative Medicine, has been awarded a F32 Postdoctoral Fellowship by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the NIH.

The project titled “Multiscale modeling of synergistic T cell activation for cancer immunotherapy.”

The sponsor is Dr. Reinhard Laubenbacher of Center of Quantitative Medicine, co-sponsor is Dr. Anthony Vella of the Department of Immunology, and collaborator is Dr. Adam Adler of the Department of Immunology.

Dr. Anna Konstorum will develop both intracellular and multiscale mathematical and computational models of combined agonist stimulation of T cell costimulatory receptors OX40 (CD137) and 4-1BB (CD134). The models will be used to decipher the critical mechanisms and scales underlying the experimentally observed synergistic behavior of these two agonists on CD8+ T cell activation, and thus will aide in the development of a quantitative platform from which to examine multiscale drug synergy for application to cancer immunotherapy.