{"entity":{"id":"cgc-matchmakers","kind":"institution","name":"MATCHMAKERS (Cancer Grand Challenges T-cell receptor team)","aka":["MATCHMAKERS","Team MATCHMAKERS"],"tldr":"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.","asOf":"2026-11-04","links":[{"label":"Cancer Grand Challenges: MATCHMAKERS","url":"https://www.cancergrandchallenges.org/matchmakers"},{"label":"T-cell receptors challenge","url":"https://www.cancergrandchallenges.org/challenges/active-challenges/t-cell-receptors"}],"tags":["research-funding"],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":["immunotherapy"],"technologies":["tcr-t"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":["cancer-grand-challenges"],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-immunotherapy-response"],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"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."],"city":"Cambridge, MA","country":"US","lat":42.36,"lng":-71.094,"institutionType":"consortium","website":"https://www.cancergrandchallenges.org/matchmakers","programs":["Large-scale TCR and peptide-MHC pairing datasets","High-throughput structural and biochemical analysis","AI tools to predict T-cell antigen recognition"]},"route":"/institutions/cgc-matchmakers/","neighbours":{"section":[{"id":"immunotherapy","kind":"section","name":"Immunotherapy","route":"/fronts/immunotherapy/"}],"technology":[{"id":"tcr-t","kind":"technology","name":"TCR-T cell therapy","route":"/technologies/tcr-t/"}],"institution":[{"id":"cancer-grand-challenges","kind":"institution","name":"Cancer Grand Challenges","route":"/institutions/cancer-grand-challenges/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-immunotherapy-response","kind":"bottleneck","name":"No one can predict who responds to immunotherapy","route":"/bottlenecks/b-immunotherapy-response/"}]}}