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SITC Computational IO Series 2026

A ten-part webinar series from the SITC Big Data and Data Sharing Committee — computational methods and clinical utility for biomarker development in immuno-oncology, with the 2026 edition aimed squarely at early-disease settings, immunoprevention, and immune interception.

  • Event: 2026 SITC Computational Immuno-Oncology Series — the sixth iteration of the series
  • Format: 10 virtual webinars, 1–1.5 h each, live Zoom + Q&A
  • Dates: May 19, 2026 → November 9, 2026 (session 10 date TBD)
  • Host: Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC), Big Data and Data Sharing Committee
  • Series page: sitcancer.org/edu/webinars/computational
  • Access: free for SITC members; $45–$125 for non-members. Registrants get four weeks of Zoom access, after which recordings are hosted permanently on SITC OnDemand.

Status: scaffold, speaker slate verified against the SITC series page (fetched 2026-08-25). Four of the ten sessions have been delivered (May 19, Jun 9, Jul 9, Jul 21); session 5 runs Aug 27. No transcripts are in this vault — unlike SCGD26, the recordings sit behind SITC OnDemand's member/registrant wall, so per-session pages currently carry the verified slate (title, date, moderator, faculty) plus corpus-fit notes, and the science sections are marked as pending recording access. Anything not attributable to the SITC page is flagged inline.

Brand disambiguation (read this first)

This is not the SITC Annual Meeting. The sitc-2026/ vault covers the SITC 41st Annual Meeting, Phoenix Convention Center, November 4–8, 2026 — ~6,000 attendees, JITC abstract supplement, embargoed press program, trials/ + tools/ templates.

This vault covers a separate, year-round educational webinar series run by one SITC committee. Different format (virtual, single-speaker, recorded), different cadence (monthly, May–November), different content type (methods tutorials and lab-in-progress talks, not embargoed abstract readouts), different audience gate (registration, not meeting badge). The two are siblings and cross-link — several series faculty are likely to also present in Phoenix — but they should not be merged, for the same reason single-cell-genomics-day-2026/ is kept separate from single-cell-genomics-2026/: same society branding, different meeting.

Why this is in the vault

  • It is a methods series, delivered, and recorded. The corpus is mostly pre-meeting scaffolds. This is a set of talks that have already happened, with a permanent hosted archive — the same reason SCGD26 earned its own vault. It is the highest-yield SITC-adjacent material available before the Phoenix meeting in November.
  • It sits on the corpus's AI-for-biology axis, in an IO frame. Session 4 is explicitly foundation models for medical imaging; session 9 is AI prediction of TCR–antigen binding; session 6 is trajectory modeling of immune escape. These map onto aacr-2026/topics/virtual-cells/, aacr-2026/topics/bioinfo-tools/, and aacr-2026/topics/single-cell-spatial-omics/.
  • The 2026 framing — immunoprevention and immune interception — is a genuinely new axis for this corpus. Early detection, pre-cancer atlases, and epigenetic risk stratification in high-risk populations are not well covered by any existing vault. Sessions 2, 3, and 10 are the seed of that thread.
  • It previews Phoenix. Series faculty and committee members are a reasonable leading indicator of who will chair and present at SITC 2026 in November, and the biomarker-methods content feeds directly into that vault's tools/ template.

Organizing committee

SITC Big Data and Data Sharing Committee:

Name Affiliation Role
Song Liu, PhD Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center Chair
Alan Hutson, PhD Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center Past Chair
Carsten Krieg, PhD Medical University of South Carolina Co-Chair
Riyue Bao, PhD UPMC Hillman Cancer Center Member

The full slate

Times are US Eastern, as published by SITC. Delivered = the session date has passed as of 2026-08-25.

# Session Date Faculty Status
1 Virome & engineered probiotic bacteria May 19 Demehri, Arpaia, Tan Delivered
2 Epigenetic-based prevention & early detection Jun 9 Bock Delivered
3 Immune-based early cancer detection Jul 9 Li Delivered
4 AI, foundation models & medical imaging Jul 21 Yu Delivered
5 Structure-based design of immunogens Aug 27 Babu Upcoming
6 Modeling immune escape trajectories Sep 15 Jerby Upcoming
7 Precision immune oncology Oct 1 Balachandran Upcoming
8 Systems immunology & T-cell memory Oct 27 Chi, Chen Upcoming
9 AI prediction of TCR–antigen binding Nov 9 Wang, Zhang, Bradley Upcoming
10 Pre-Cancer Atlas TBD Shain Unscheduled

See Sessions for the per-session pages.

Threads running through the series

Immunoprevention / interception (new to this corpus). Sessions 1, 2, 3, and 10 all address the pre-malignant window — microbiome and probiotic engineering, epigenetic risk in high-risk cohorts, immune-based early detection, and a pre-cancer atlas. No existing vault covers this; it is the strongest argument for building this one out.

Antigen and receptor prediction. Sessions 5 and 9 bracket the structural-design problem from both ends: designing immunogens and predicting TCR–antigen binding. Both are protein-ML problems and connect to the protein-language-model material in talks/fm-to-virtual-cells/adjacent-methods/protein-lm-explainability.md.

Modeling cell state and trajectory. Sessions 6 and 8 are single-cell/systems-immunology modeling in an IO frame — immune-escape trajectories and T-cell memory programs — and are the natural bridge to the AACR single-cell + spatial and virtual-cells topics.

Clinical translation. Session 7 (precision IO) and the biomarker framing throughout feed the SITC 2026 tools/ template and, on the trial side, asco-2026/trials/.

What to harvest next

  1. Recording access. The four delivered sessions are on SITC OnDemand. With registrant or member access, these pages can be upgraded from scaffold to transcript-backed, matching the SCGD26 standard.
  2. Speaker-work linkage. Each faculty page should link the specific methods and papers the talk covered — deliberately left out for now rather than guessed at.
  3. Sessions 5–10 as they land. Session 5 is two days out; the series runs to November 9, finishing the same week as the SITC Annual Meeting.

Sources