So many targets —
why can't the immune system take them?
The immune system spends all day on a single question — is this me, or not me?
Cancer gives the most ambiguous possible answer. Over these 20 lessons you unpack antigen presentation, TMB, immune deserts, checkpoints, T cell exhaustion, M1 monocytes and regulatory T cells, one at a time, until you can read the abstract and all eight figures of the DDX54 paper (PNAS 2025) on your own.
It is a concepts course, but every number is real — 4,702 TCGA patients, plus values the sibling courses on this site computed from raw data. Python runs right inside this page. There is nothing to install.
How you'll learn
What makes a paper hard is usually not the mathematics but the vocabulary. Set up the twenty terms in the abstract first, and the eight figures start reading themselves.
A concepts course is no excuse for invented numbers. Only 4,702 real TCGA patients and values the sibling courses computed from raw data. Where a number is a model rather than a measurement, it says so.
The same cell does opposite things in different settings. M2 macrophages, regulatory T cells, exhaustion — each is a necessary mechanism somewhere else. Memorising them as good or bad guarantees you will be wrong.
Every term here is tagged with the exact lesson in /gene, /immune, /spatial or /til where you check it against data. Once you know the words, the computation gets easy.