CSCI Visitor Seminar - David Gfeller

The Teichmann Research group are delighted to welcome David Gfeller to the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute on Thursday 10 September 2026.

Title: 'Deciphering TCR Sp[ecifically One Epitope at a Time'

Please join the seminar, everyone is welcome.

Interactions between T-Cell Receptors (TCRs) and antigenic peptides presented on Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) molecules are central to the immune recognition of infected and malignant cells. The complexity of the TCR sequence space, the flexibility of the TCR-epitope interface and the lack of a standardised framework to visualise TCR specificity have hindered a comprehensive understanding of the principles governing TCR-epitope recognition across a broad range of epitopes. Here, we introduce a fully interpretable probabilistic framework, termed TCR specificity profiles (TSPs), which captures fundamental properties distinguishing epitope-specific from baseline TCR repertoires. We demonstrate that TSPs unravel key determinants of TCR-epitope recognition specificity. By identifying and analysing thousands of TCRs recognising multiple epitope variants, we show that TSPs can predict cross-reactivity and reveal how TCR specificity evolves with epitope sequence, binding mode and MHC restriction. TSPs further reveal how AlphaFold3 can be used to decipher key determinants of TCR recognition specificity for some epitopes.

Prof. Gfeller was trained in Physics and received his PhD in Theoretical Physics at EPFL. He then transitioned to Computational Biology during his post-doctoral work at University of Toronto and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. After a short stay as a visiting scientist at EBI with Prof. Sarah Teichmann, he was recruited as an Assistant Professor at University of Lausanne in 2014, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. His research focuses in understanding cancer immune cell interactions. 

If you would like to meet with David during their visit, please get in touch with Nicola Ellis.