Home Department: Electrical Engineering
Mentor: Xiaojing Gao (Chemical Engineering)

“Annotating the Clinical Significance of Transmembrane Domains with Protein Language Models and High-Throughput Screening"

Membrane proteins and their transmembrane domains (TMDs) are critical in human health. They disproportionally serve as drug targets and are commonly used in engineered therapeutic solutions such as adoptive cell therapies, including chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy (CAR-T). However, our understanding and ability to engineer TMDs are limited, with most clinically observed TMD variants remaining unevaluated. Samarth aims to (1) validate and expand high-throughput assays to characterize the surface-level expression of clinically relevant TMD variants, (2) establish computational algorithms to annotate TMD variants with unknown clinical significance, and (3) design CAR-T TMDs with desired functional phenotypes.