De Novo Engineering of Antigen Specificity in Primary Human T Cells

Kristoffer Haurum Johansen, PhD, is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Denmark, where he leads the Synthetic Immunology Lab in the Section for Experimental and Translational Immunology. His new laboratory investigates how T cells convert receptor signals into fate and function, and how those decisions can be reprogrammed, combining de novo computational protein design, pooled CRISPR screens and T-cell engineering in primary human cells. He completed his PhD as a Wellcome Trust and NIH 4-year PhD Scholar at the University of Cambridge and NIH with Professor Klaus Okkenhaug (Cambridge) and Dr Pamela Schwartzberg (NIH). Following his PhD, he did his postdoctoral work at the Technical University of Denmark, supported by a Lundbeck Foundation Postdoc fellowship. His recent work established de novo-designed minibinders against peptide-MHC complexes as a route to precision immunotherapy.