Arraane Rajaguru
BSc, Visiting MSc Student
Research Interests:
My research sits at the intersection of cancer immunology and protein engineering. It starts with a question that has driven everything I have done: why do some patients respond to treatment and others do not?
When tumour cells acquire mutations, some altered proteins get displayed on the cell surface via HLA molecules and can in principle be detected by T cells. HLA is highly variable across human populations, meaning a T cell receptor trained to recognise a tumour protein on one HLA variant will often fail on another. This is a significant barrier to broadly effective immunotherapy, and it means that promising T cell based therapies are currently only accessible to a fraction of the patients who could benefit from them. That is not good enough.
My work focuses on engineering T cell receptors to overcome this limitation. Specifically, I am working to understand the structural features that allow a receptor restricted to one HLA type to recognise the same neoantigen when presented by a different variant. The goal is to expand the patient populations who could benefit from T cell based therapies targeting shared cancer mutations, and make off-the-shelf immunotherapy accessible to far more of the people who need it.
Background:
I completed my BSc in Molecular and Technical Medicine at Hochschule Furtwangen University in February 2024. My Bachelor's thesis investigated GAB2 as a modulator of immune signalling and
inflammation in CML. It was here that I first became genuinely fascinated by how cancer cells manipulate the immune system to their advantage. During my MSc in Molecular Medicine at Ulm University, I deliberately built my training across very different systems and environments, from functional drug profiling in patient-derived pancreatic cancer organoids to CRISPR-based genome editing in human induced pluripotent stem cells, because I wanted to understand cancer and disease mechanisms from more than one angle. Each experience added a layer to how I think about intervening at the molecular level.
In March 2026 I joined the lab of Dr Malcolm J. W. Sim at the NDM Centre for Immuno-Oncology at the University of Oxford, where I am now carrying out my Master's thesis on the structural and functional basis of neoantigen presentation and T cell receptor recognition. Every patient deserves a therapy tailored to them. That is what I am working toward.