We are delighted to announce that Dr Asher Mullokandov from the CMPH, has been granted the Crick-Turing Biomedical Data Science Award.

This award aims to catalyse productive collaborative research between biomedical investigators and data scientists as well as provides funding for post-doctoral level researchers working in the field of AI and data science. Researchers are based at the Crick for up to 12 months to pilot research projects collaboratively developed with a biomedical investigator to apply data science approaches to biomedical challenges.

New experimental techniques such as Imaging Mass Cytometry have enabled the characterization of single cells in their native microenvironment in unprecedented detail: dozens of cell features, and cell states, can be identified, together with their precise locations. Dr Mullokandov’s project project aims to understand the elaborate interactions present in tumor microenvironments—highly intricate complexes of many normal and malignant cell types. Understanding these interactions is emerging as a vital step in developing novel immunotherapies for cancer, and in identifying patients likely to benefit from such therapies. Dr Mullokandov employs methods from graph theory, discrete geometry, and stochastic processes to characterize regions of the tumor microenvironment and to model interactions between cells at various scales, and we develop deep learning-based algorithms, as well as model interpretation approaches, to learn and analyze relationships between cell phenotypes and spatial localization.

This work is a collaboration between the Centre for Mathematics of Precision Healthcare, at the Imperial College Department of Mathematics, and the Downward oncogene laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, and is funded by the Crick-Turing Biomedical Data Science Award, a joint programme of the Francis Crick Institute and the Alan Turing Institute.