University of Pittsburgh Professor Receives Prestigious CAREER Award for Immunotherapy Research

Strategic Insights -

Natasa Miskov-Zivanov, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, has been awarded a $581,503 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her project on artificial intelligence-driven immunotherapy design. Miskov-Zivanov aims to develop an automated system that leverages AI and knowledge graphs to design more effective lymphocytes, with the goal of revolutionizing the treatment of blood cancers.

Miskov-Zivanov's project seeks to address the limitations of current CAR T cell-based therapies, which have been less successful in treating solid tumors. Her automated framework will survey scientific literature and databases to retrieve and integrate expert knowledge with experimental data, recommending more effective CAR T cells and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). The system will utilize both traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches and large language models (LLM) to read, analyze, and interpret research papers and experimental data.

Key Takeaways:

  • Miskov-Zivanov's project aims to develop an artificial intelligence-driven framework for designing efficient and explainable immunotherapies, with a focus on CAR T cells and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs).
  • The automated system will integrate knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, and large language models to retrieve and analyze scientific literature and experimental data.
  • Miskov-Zivanov's research has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of blood cancers and improve the effectiveness of CAR T cell-based therapies.
  • The project will also develop new prompting methods for large language models to extract meaningful data and insights from scientific literature.
  • Miskov-Zivanov has introduced a new graduate-level course on knowledge graphs and their applications at the University of Pittsburgh.

Statistics:

  • Miskov-Zivanov is awarded a $581,503 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her project on artificial intelligence-driven immunotherapy design.
  • The project aims to develop an automated system that can analyze tens of thousands of research papers to extract meaningful data and insights.
  • The research has the potential to improve the effectiveness of CAR T cell-based therapies, which have been shown to be successful in treating blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.
  • The project will utilize both traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches and large language models (LLM) to analyze scientific literature and experimental data.
  • Miskov-Zivanov's project has the potential to make a meaningful impact in the field of immunotherapy and advance life-saving research challenges.

Sources:

  • "Natasa Miskov-Zivanov Receives Prestigious CAREER Award for Immunotherapy Research." VerticalNews Health, 22 Jun. 2025,