Tejas R. Jammihal

Education

Master of Biotechnology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA (2018 – 2020)
Master & Bachelor of Technology in Biological Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India (2012 – 2017)
- Minor in Nanotechnology

Designing, developing, and validating bespoke pipelines to quantify the expression of human endogenous retroviruses from short reads transcriptomic data
Discovered correlates of survival and novel antigenic targets by applying the pipeline on in-vitro and clinical lymphoma datasets
Developing analysis methods for leading 3rd generation long-read sequencing platforms and performing technical validation to benchmark their performance for isoform characterization, structural variation detection and antigen discovery applications
Writing, analyzing data, and generating figures for grant applications and manuscripts

Elucidated the role of clonal neoantigens and tertiary lymphoid structures as prognostic biomarkers of exceptional response to immune checkpoint blockade therapy in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC)
Identified that a mutational signature corresponding to defective repair of DNA damage by homologous recombination was enriched in triple negative breast cancer patients with both poorer overall survival and primary resistance
Implemented bioinformatics pipelines and statistical tools based on published literature and packaged them as containers to be used for analysis on the cloud
Analyzed whole exome sequencing and RNA sequencing data of 2000+ patients from clinical cohorts of ccRCC patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors and publicly available datasets of cancer like TCGA, PCAWG, etc

Identified transcriptomic signatures of physiological response to cigarette smoke in pre-clinical models of smoking, by analyzing gene expression profiling datasets
Collaborated with scientists involved in translational research and drug discovery to gain mechanistic insights of the underlying biological mechanisms in the disease models
Created interactive dashboard to visualize the results from computational analysis
Assessed the activity of discovered signatures in human disease data to inform expansion opportunities of existing drugs

Topic: Block Copolymer Micelles for Amphotericin B Delivery

Created a shelf stable micellar formulation of Amphotericin B, demonstrated improved aqueous solubility, sustained drug release and lowered toxicity profile

Reviewed scientific literature to validate genes associated with metabolism and antioxidant activity of micronutrients, for product development and customer information

Studied the effect of gamma irradiation on epithelial cells by metabolic labelling followed by protein expression to investigate how Mycobacterium tuberculosis infect epithelial cells

Barroso-Sousa, R., Forman, J., Collier, K., Weber, Z. T., Jammihal, T. R., Kao, K. Z., … & Tolaney, S. M. (2022). Multidimensional Molecular Profiling of Metastatic Triple-Negative Breast Cancer and Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Benefit. JCO precision oncology, 6, e2100413.

Jammihal, T. R., Saliby, R. M., Labaki, C., McGregor, B., Zarif, T. E., Braun, D., . . . Shukla, S.A. Clonal neoantigen load and tertiary lymphoid structure formation are associated with exceptional response to immune checkpoint inhibition in clear cell renal cell carcinoma.
- Selected oral abstract presentation Kidney Cancer Research Summit, Philadelphia, PA (Oct 2022)
- Research Town Hall, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX (Oct 2022)
- New England GU Oncology Young Investigator Forum (Nov 2022)
Saliby, R. M., Jammihal, T. R., Labaki, C., Xie, W., Zarif, T. E., Motzer, R., . . . Braun, D . Are the IMmotion151-molecular signatures predictive of treatment outcomes in the JAVELIN Renal 101 trial? Peer reviewed presentation at Kidney Cancer Research Summit, Philadelphia, PA (Oct 2022)
Saliby, R. M., Jammihal, T., Labaki, C., Xie, W., Motzer, R. J., Powles, T., … Choueiri, T. K. (2022). Cross-trial validation of molecular subtypes in patients with metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma (RCC): The JAVELIN Renal 101 experience. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 40(16_suppl), 4531–4531. doi:10.1200/JCO.2022.40.16_suppl.4531

* co-first authorship

Peer Mentor, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX
- Familiarized new hires with technical and biological knowhow pertaining to immunogenomics and neoantigen prediction. Guided them through data analysis and interpretation of results 2022 – Present
Teaching Assistant, IITM, Chennai, India
- Courses: Biomolecular Analysis Lab, Biomaterials Lab
- Demonstrated and assisted in laboratory experiments, graded lab reports, and administered exams for 45 students. 2016 – 2017
Volunteer, National Service Scheme, Chennai, India
- Mentored and tutored high-school blind students at a government school. Created audio material library for to their STEM coursework. 2012 – 2013

Awarded teaching assistantship by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India to cover 50% of tuition 2016 – 2017
Achieved all India rank of 113 (99.74 percentile) in the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering 2016
Cleared the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Joint Entrance examination, placed in the top 1% and selected to attend IIT Madras, Chennai 2012
Among the top 300 students selected across India to appear for the Indian National Astronomy Olympiad 2009 & 2008
Awarded the silver medal (top 0.05%) in the Dr. Homi Bhabha Young Scientist competition 2008 & 2005

Somatic mutation and copy number calling, purity and ploidy estimation, clonal and phylogenetic reconstruction, mutational signature analysis, immunogenomics, neoantigen prediction, differential expression, survival analysis, unsupervised clustering, random forest classification