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Session 1 — Virome & engineered probiotic bacteria immunotherapy

Series: 2026 SITC Computational IO Series, session 1 of 10 Date: May 19, 2026, 12:00–1:30 p.m. ET (90 min — one of three long slots in the series) Moderator: Riyue Bao, PhD — UPMC Hillman Cancer Center (Big Data and Data Sharing Committee member) Faculty:

  • Shawn Demehri, MD, PhD — Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Nicholas Arpaia, PhD — Columbia University
  • Aik Choon Tan, PhD — Huntsman Cancer Institute

Recording: SITC OnDemand (registrant / member access) Status: Delivered · content pending recording access

What the session covers

Per the SITC series listing, the session pairs the virome and engineered probiotic bacteria as immunotherapy modalities. The three-faculty, 90-minute shape suggests the standard split this series uses for its long slots: two biology talks plus a computational-methods talk — here plausibly viral/microbial immunology (Demehri), engineered bacterial therapeutics (Arpaia), and the bioinformatics of microbiome and multi-omics data (Tan). That reading is inferred from the faculty roster and slot length, not stated by SITC; confirm against the recording.

Why it matters to this corpus

  • Opens the microbiome axis. No existing vault covers microbiome-directed IO in depth, though SITC 2026 anticipates 16S/shotgun protocols in its tools/ template. This session is the natural anchor for that thread.
  • Living-therapeutic engineering — engineered probiotics as a delivery chassis — is adjacent to the cell-therapy material scaffolded in sitc-2026/trials/.
  • Immunoprevention framing. As the opener for a series aimed at early-disease settings and immune interception, this session sets up the pre-malignant-window thread that continues in session 2, session 3, and session 10.

Open items

  • [ ] Obtain OnDemand recording; replace the inferred summary above with talk-level content.
  • [ ] Individual talk titles were not published on the series page — capture from the recording.
  • [ ] Link each speaker's specific methods/papers once the recording confirms what was presented.

Sources