University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, California, United States
My name is Darwin Kwok M.S., and I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) co-mentored by Dr. Hideho Okada M.D. Ph.D. and Dr. Joseph Costello Ph.D. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon Unversity with a dual B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering and a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering. My research focus is dedicated towards developing noninvasive targeted therapies for brain tumors. During a joint fellowship between Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh, I designed and optimized a method of treating neoplasms across bilayer membranes through sonoporation-induced drug delivery. At Yale University, I helped develop an accurate visualization of the kinetics in neoantigen-dependent T cell-tumor cell interactions utilizing a novel inversion-inducible joined antigen (NINJA) murine model. Notably I designed multiple MATLAB GUI softwares to access T-cell infiltration/inflammation upon NINJA induction and to volumetrically reconstruct a 3-D representation of tertiary lymphoid structures from IF images. My most recent work at UCSF identified tumor-wide neoantigens produced by clonal aberrant alternative splicing events (neojunctions) across multiple cancers, including gliomas. In this project, I defined the underlying molecular mechanism to which aberrant splicing factor expression facilitates the generation of neojunctions and developed TCR-based therapies targeting neojunction-derived neoantigens. I utilize various aspects of bioinformatics, epigenetics, and immunology to investigate the unique downstream epigenetic effects of mutant IDH1 and to better understand how it can lead to the production of immunogenic targets.
