Dr. Bin Chen is an assitant professor for the College of Human Medicine. In collaboration with the Spartan Innovation Center, he strives to improve cancer immunotherapy in his research. The MSU Innovation Center uses technology and innovation to create community and business partnerships. Chen and the Innovation Center worked together to combine his cancer research with artificial intelligence.
I’m an assistant professor in the College of Human Medicine. My lab is mostly interested in the use of big data and artificial intelligence to discover new therapeutics, especially for cancer.
The idea is a very brand-new idea; it’s basically trying to use the immune system — trying to develop large molecules to induce the immune system to kill the cancer cells.
Currently, with the cancer immunotherapy, only 20% of patients respond to the checkpoint inhibitors, which means there are about 80% of patients who don’t respond to the immunotherapy.
How can we find these responders and non-responders? We need the data to help understand. There is a ton of data publicly available, and our technologies help them to use the big —currently open — big data, to understand the non-responders.
In therapeutic discovery, there’s always a concern about IP (intellectual property). And this is quite new to both my lab and also the company. We want to have someone who can help us protect the interests of both parties.
The Innovation Center was very helpful in establishing this collaboration.
It’s quite an exciting field, frankly, but also quite new to me. Maybe we can use our big data facility — our infrastructure — to help cancer immunotherapy.