WEHI Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Special Seminar hosted by Drs James Fu, Mengbo Li & Givanna Putri

Dr Kelvin Tuong

Senior Research Fellow & Affiliate of Child Health Research Centre; Affiliate Senior Research Fellow of Frazer Institute; Affiliate of Ian Frazer Centre for Childhood Immunotherapy Research – University of Queensland

Tracking "Biometric Fingerprints" for Paediatric Cancer with Deep-Learning
 

Davis Auditorium

Join via ZOOM

Including Q&A session

Paediatric cancers are remarkably heterogeneous, both clinically and genomically. Traditional minimal residual disease (MRD) detection methods, such as multi-parametric flow cytometry, are limited by sensitivity, often missing low-burden disease that ultimately relapse. In this talk, I will present our preliminary/unpublished proof-of-concept work on training deep-learning models to learn and track these individualised cancer and immune signatures, akin to ‘biometric fingerprints’. With single-cell gene expression data, we use deep-learning on individual patients’ unique cancer expression profile. For immune tracking, we are training graph neural networks to perform classification of T-cell receptors in cancer versus healthy. Together, we hope that the models have the potential to better detect residual disease and forecast relapse by recognising the recurrence of a patient’s molecular fingerprint in follow-up samples.

Dr. Kelvin (Zewen) Tuong is a Senior Research Fellow and 2026 NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow leading the Computational Immunology group in the Ian Frazer Centre for Children’s Immunotherapy Research at The University of Queensland. He was originally trained as a molecular cell biologist and gradually transitioned into bioinformatics during his post-doctoral training at the University of Cambridge and Sanger Institute, where he developed single-cell analysis software such as Dandelion for immune repertoire analysis and contributed to development of various other open-source software on GitHub e.g. Scirpy, scRepertoire, CellPhoneDB and ktplots/ktplotspy, nxviz etc. He has published ~50 articles in the last 5 years including as lead first/co-first/last/co-last author Nature Medicine, Nature Methods, Nature Biotechnology, J Exp Med etc. His lab is focused on investigating the development and perturbation of paediatric immunity using single-cell and machine learning techniques, particularly focusing on single-cell and immune repertoire analysis.

All welcome!