Hesham El Abd is a doctoral researcher at the IKMB and the 3rd generation at the Research Training Group 1743 Genes, Environment and Inflammation, currently working on the project: TP8 – 2018, Applying machine learning for analyzing the peptidomics and transcriptomic of HLA-II.  He was awarded the ZMB Young Researcher Grant for the year 2019 for the project: Analyzing the peptidome of HLA-DRB1*13:01 using artificial intelligence and immuno-peptidomics. The grant is 5,000€ and it will be spent on gaining more understanding of the role of HLA-DRB1*13:01 on inflammatory bowel disease.
The aim of the project is to perform an in-depth immune-peptidomics characterization of the inflammatory bowel disease-associated HLA-II allele, HLA-DRB1*13:01 in collaboration with Prof. Bacher’s Lab and Prof. Tholey’s Lab. The initial phase of the project will be carried in Prof. Bacher’s Lab where the ligandome of HLA-DRB1*13:01 protein will be eluted followed by Mass-spectrometry based detection of these peptides at Prof Tholey’s Lab. Then Hesham El Abd will analyze the generated data bioinformatically and use it for building AI-based models.