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Understanding why some patients respond to immune checkpoint therapy while others do not remains a critical challenge in cancer research. This talk will explore three key studies that shed light on this question. First, we uncover metabolic predictors of response to checkpoint blockade therapy, revealing how tumor and immune cell metabolism shape treatment outcomes. Next, we present a single-cell meta-analysis of T cell clonal dynamics, highlighting their role in immunotherapy success. Finally, we introduce scXpand, a machine-learning approach for predicting T cell clonality from scRNA-seq, offering a novel tool to enhance immunotherapy research and precision medicine.

Given a distribution of images, how can we can decompose the data into a set of underlying components? In this talk, I'll present an approach that decomposes images into a underlying composable energy functions. I'll illustrate how energy functions allow us to represent both global components of an image, such as lighting as well as local components such as objects. I'll further show how we leverage pretrained vision models to infer these components. Finally, I'll illustrate how discover components can be recombined to form a variety of images substantially different than those seen at training time.

Speaker's bio:

Yilun Du is an incoming assistant professor at Harvard and is currently a senior research scientist at Google Deepmind. He received has PhD and BS from MIT and was supported by a NSF graduate fellowship.

In my talk I will introduce a novel framework that applies a principle from information theory, that of Minimum Description Length (MDL), to understand how regulation of human gene expression across organs, tissues is shaped by regulatory architecture.Examination of expression patterns of human genes across the body reveals an intriguing duality: While many genes are expressed in only one tissue, others, known as “housekeeping genes”, are ubiquitously expressed in essentially every tissue. Yet, interestingly, a considerable portion of the genes are on the mid-range, deliberately expressed in many tissues but are also absent in many others.Intuitively, in human language terms, specifying the expression program of the genes on the two ends of the spectrum requires a short description – e.g. “expressed in all tissues”, or “expressed only in brain”. Yet specifying the expression of genes in the middle of the scale requires longer description, or a longer MDL, having to specify in each tissue if the gene is expressed or not, and at what level. We sought to measure regulatory complexity of each human gene and examine if the MDL principle predicts and explains regulatory complexity. Our findings lend support to the MDL principle’s prediction. Our measure of regulatory complexity of a gene’s expression pattern can be predicted by quantifying its regulatory information content. In the talk we shall discuss evolutionary implications to the development of multi-cellularity.FOR THE LATEST UPDATES AND CONTENT ON SOFT MATTER AND BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS AT THE WEIZMANN, VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.biosoftweizmann.com/ 

This is the first of a two-part talk covering pages 19–30 of [Lub]

Olfaction plays a crucial role in human perception, yet individuals with isolated congenital anosmia (ICA) navigate the world without ever experiencing smells. I will present findings from my research investigating how ICA influences behavior, physiology, and social interaction, with a particular focus on responses to fear-related chemosignals. First, I will describe distinct respiratory patterns observed in anosmics, both in general and in response to specific social and environmental contexts. While anosmics exhibited reduced sniff modulation in response to social cues, they adapted their breathing patterns similarly to normosmics during environmental transitions, suggesting compensatory mechanisms independent of olfaction. Next, I will discuss behavioral and physiological responses to fear sweat, demonstrating that normosmics exhibit heightened emotional engagement, whereas anosmics show reversed or minimal responses. These findings emphasize the role of olfactory input in emotional contagion and align with research on sensory processing differences in other populations. Finally, I will present functional brain imaging data revealing distinct neural activation patterns in anosmics in response to fear-related cues. While anosmics lack olfactory perception, they recruit alternative neural pathways, with lateralized brain activity suggesting adaptive mechanisms for processing social and emotional information. Together, these findings provide novel insights into the interplay between olfaction, social behavior, and neural adaptation. They highlight how anosmics adjust to sensory deficits and raise important questions about the flexibility of human sensory processing.