Inside a New Public Immune Atlas for Pancreatic Cancer

Imagine exploring immune profiles and clinical outcomes in seconds. In this interview with Targeted Oncology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researchers Won Jin Ho, MD, and Dimitri Sidiropoulos, PhD describe the development of a new cytometric atlas designed to advance immunotherapy research in pancreatic cancer—a disease that remains highly lethal and difficult to treat.

Their work builds on decades of pioneering immunotherapy research and reflects a strategy focused on steady, incremental progress through carefully designed clinical trials. Over the years, their group has accumulated a large collection of clinical biospecimens from patients treated with immunotherapy approaches. Using modern single-cell technologies and mass cytometry, the team has been able to characterize immune cell populations in high detail. These tools enable high-throughput profiling of immune cells and allow investigators to examine how different therapies shape immune responses.

By integrating these technologies with computational biology expertise, the team developed an immune atlas that aggregates data from multiple studies. The first version of the atlas includes immune profiles from 3 clinical trials evaluating a pancreatic cancer–specific vaccine combined with checkpoint inhibitors in patients with metastatic disease. The dataset currently contains more than 200 biospecimens from over 60 patients, with samples collected at multiple time points before and after treatment. This design allows researchers to track how immune profiles change with therapy and to evaluate the effects of adding additional treatments.

A central aim of the project is to identify promising immunotherapy combinations that could serve as a backbone for future treatment strategies. By analyzing immune responses across trials and time points, investigators can generate hypotheses about which combinations may produce the most meaningful biological effects.

To make this resource broadly accessible, the team collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science to host the atlas on SciServer. The platform provides a graphical interface that allows researchers to explore immune profiles, clinical outcomes, and treatment timelines directly online.

Importantly, the atlas profiles multiple immune lineages—including T cells and myeloid cells—enabling a comprehensive view of systemic immune responses. By making these complex datasets publicly explorable, the researchers hope to accelerate hypothesis generation and guide the next generation of immunotherapy strategies for pancreatic cancer.

Read the full feature here.

Access the atlas on the SciServer website here.