AI Unlocks T Cell Receptor Secrets

T cell receptors (TCRs) are proteins on immune cells that help the body recognize and eliminate threats, such as infections. Each person’s TCR repertoire is highly diverse, with some "public" sequences shared across many people and others "private", and unique to individuals. In a recent Science Advances article, Prof. Sol Efroni and colleagues describe two newly developed Transformer-based language models, CVC and scCVC, designed to analyze TCR sequences using advanced machine learning. These models were trained on a vast dataset of millions of TCR sequences, collected from both bulk and single-cell studies. After training, these models could distinguish between "public" and "private" TCR sequences, identify patterns linked to specific genes, and provide insights into specialized immune cells. This work is an excellent demonstration of the potential of computational tools to uncover hidden patterns in immune systems, paving the way for a better understanding of immunity and the development of targeted immunotherapies.