Khokhar, A. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2026

Organoid modeling of tumor-associated macrophages reveals phagocytosis checkpoint blockade-induced conversion to an immunosuppressive SPP1+ phenotype

Tumor-associated macrophages (TAM) exert essential functions during the immune response to cancer. However, investigations of TAM within a native human tumor microenvironment (TME) have been impeded by a lack of appropriate model systems. Here, patient-derived organoids (PDO) from air-liquid interface (ALI)-grown tumor fragments, containing a human TME that encompassed stroma and immune subsets, robustly preserved TAM that were maintained by endogenous CSF-1 and appropriately responded to polarization signals. Antibody blockade of the CD47 regulatory checkpoint in organoids stimulated phagocytosis and remodeled TAM cytokine secretion profiles that were confirmed in anti-CD47 phase I trial patients. Amongst PDO histologies screened, anti-CD47 tumor killing was notable in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) which was associated with increased TAM infiltration. PDO contained diverse previously described TAM subsets; however, anti-CD47 reprogrammed organoid TAM toward an immunosuppressive SPP1+ phenotype, highlighting a negative feedback mechanism. Our findings uncover a resistance circuit engaged by macrophage checkpoint blockade and position ALI PDO as a robust translational platform for dissecting human macrophage biology and informing precision immunotherapy.

cancer biology↗

bioRxiv2026

FiCOPS: Hardware/Software Co-Design of FPGA Computational Framework for Mass Spectrometry-Based Peptide Database Search

Improving the speed and efficiency of database search algorithms that deduce peptides from mass spectrometry (MS) data has been an active area of research for more than three decades. The significance of the need for faster database search methods has rapidly increased due to the growing interest in studying non-model organisms, meta-proteomics, and proteogenomic data, which are notorious for their enormous search space. Poor scalability of serial algorithms with the growing size of the database and increasing parameters of post-translational modifications is a widely recognized problem. While high-performance computing techniques can be used on supercomputing machines, the need for real-time, on-the-instrument solutions necessitates the development of an efficient sytem-on-chip that optimizes design constraints such as cost, performance, and power of the system. To show case that such a system can work, we present an FPGA-based computational framework called FiCOPS to accelerate database search using a hardware/software co-design methodology. First, we theoretically analyze the database-search algorithm (closed-search) to reveal opportunities for parallelism and uncover computational bottlenecks. We then design an FPGA-based architectural template to exploit parallelism inherent in the search workload. We also formulate an analytical performance model for the architecture template to perform rapid design space exploration and find a near-optimal accelerator configuration. Finally, we implement our design on the Intel Stratix 10 FPGA platform and evaluate it using real-world datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that FiCOPS achieves 3.5 x speed-up over existing CPU solutions and 3x and 5x reduction in power consumption compared to existing CPU and GPU solutions.

bioinformatics↗