Mohammad Shahbazy, PhD

Moh is passionate about proteomics, bioinformatics, analytical biochemistry, mass spectrometry, and antigen discovery research. He obtained an MSc in analytical chemistry and bioinformatics (machine learning) strategies for biomedical data analysis for early cancer diagnosis to pursue these research interests. Through a postgraduate research program, he received a PhD in the Immunoproteomics Lab led by Prof Anthony (Tony) Purcell at the Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University (2023). During his PhD candidature career, he endeavored to develop high-throughput mass spectrometry-based proteomics and immunopeptidomics platforms for quantitative analysis of stability profiles and PTMs in MHC/HLA-bound peptides. He developed immunoinformatics software tools for unsupervised data visualization and clustering analysis of MHC peptides to mine immunopeptidomes and explore antigen landscapes. Moreover, he developed machine learning models to predict peptide immunogenicity profiles and T-cell responses for virus-derived MHC peptides with physicochemical features and thermostability predictors to shortlist potential targets for more efficient T-cell immunotherapies and vaccines. In 2024, Moh joined Dr Etienne Caron Lab to continue his journey in exploring cancer-specific (neo)antigens by integrating immunopeptidomics, proteogenomics, quantitative proteomics workflows, multi-omics strategies, and thermal immunopeptidome profiling.