# MATCHMAKERS (Cancer Grand Challenges T-cell receptor team)

Source: https://onco.cc/institutions/cgc-matchmakers/  
OnCo record `cgc-matchmakers` (Institution). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

An international team, funded in 2024 by Cancer Grand Challenges, that is collecting huge amounts of data on how immune cells recognise cancer so that a computer can predict it, with the aim of designing immunotherapy for each person's own tumour.

## Summary

MATCHMAKERS tackles the T-cell receptors challenge, to decipher the T-cell receptor cancer-recognition code. It is led by Michael Birnbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was funded in 2024; the page lists ten institutions with locations in Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK and the US. The team's three aims are to generate datasets of thousands of T-cell receptor and peptide-MHC pairs from clinical samples, mouse models, synthetic antigens and engineered receptors; to analyse the structures and biochemistry of those interactions at scale; and to train AI models that predict which tumour antigens a given receptor recognises, so that recognition could be predicted from routine biopsies or blood and antigen-specific receptors designed for personalised immunotherapy.

## Fields

- Kind: Institution
- Last checked: 2026-11-04
- Also known as: MATCHMAKERS; Team MATCHMAKERS
- Tags: research-funding
- City: Cambridge, MA, US
- Type: consortium
- Website: https://www.cancergrandchallenges.org/matchmakers

## Notes

- Placed at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the lead's institution, which has no institution record. The page's prose says five countries while its summary lists six locations; the six are given.
- Michael Birnbaum has no person record and is named but not linked.

## Sources

- Cancer Grand Challenges: MATCHMAKERS: https://www.cancergrandchallenges.org/matchmakers
- T-cell receptors challenge: https://www.cancergrandchallenges.org/challenges/active-challenges/t-cell-receptors

## Connected records

- fronts: [Immunotherapy](https://onco.cc/fronts/immunotherapy/)
- technologies: [TCR-T cell therapy](https://onco.cc/technologies/tcr-t/)
- institutions: [Cancer Grand Challenges](https://onco.cc/institutions/cancer-grand-challenges/)
- bottlenecks: [No one can predict who responds to immunotherapy](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-immunotherapy-response/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/cgc-matchmakers.json