MCB assistant professor Kazuki Nagashima has been awarded an Aramont Fellowship for Emerging Science Research, recognizing exceptional early-career scientists pursuing bold and innovative research.
Established in 2017 through a gift from the Aramont Charitable Foundation, the fellowship supports high-risk, high-reward research that has the potential to open new scientific directions. The award provides $100,000 in funding over approximately one to two years, enabling investigators to explore ambitious ideas that may not yet qualify for traditional grant support.
Nagashima’s research focuses on a fundamental question in immunology: how T cells recognize the molecules that trigger immune responses. “T cells are constantly scanning the body for signs of infection or disease,” Nagashima said. “Each T cell carries a unique receptor that recognizes a specific antigen.”
The challenge is scale. The human immune system contains millions of different T cells, each expressing a different receptor capable of recognizing a different target. While scientists have identified a handful of well-known examples—such as T cells that recognize influenza or SARS-CoV-2 antigens—most T cell targets remain unknown.
“In many cases we simply don’t know what antigen a T cell receptor is recognizing,” Nagashima said. “Those well-known examples are really just the tip of the iceberg.”
With support from the Aramont Fellowship, Nagashima’s lab aims to develop a new approach to identify T cell targets on a much larger scale. “My goal is to create a technology that can discover thousands of antigens through a single experimental system,” he said. “Right now there is no method that allows us to do this systematically.”
Such a tool could significantly expand scientists’ ability to study immune responses, with potential applications ranging from cancer immunotherapy to vaccine development.
Nagashima noted that the ambitious nature of the project made the Aramont Fellowship especially important. “This is a very bold project, and technologies like this don’t yet exist,” he said. “Traditional grants often require a lot of preliminary data, which makes it hard to pursue ideas that are still at an early stage.”
The research will be led experimentally by Xueyang Dong, a postdoctoral fellow in the Nagashima lab. By enabling large-scale discovery of T cell antigens, the team hopes to uncover new insights into how the immune system detects disease.
“If we can start identifying thousands of targets instead of just a few examples,” Nagashima said, “we’ll gain a much deeper understanding of how T cell responses work.”
