Alex Rubinsteyn

Alex Rubinsteyn, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics and Computational Medicine Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. He is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Rubinsteyn leads the Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab (PIRL), a multi-investigator group focused on developing cancer immunotherapies that harness patients' immune systems to attack tumor-specific targets.

Dr. Rubinsteyn's research centers on applications of machine learning, genomics, and computational immunology to therapeutic cancer vaccine design. His work bridges computational approaches with experimental validation, with a particular focus on neoantigen discovery and personalized vaccine development. He has been instrumental in designing and running several early-stage clinical trials of neoantigen vaccines, initially at Mount Sinai and currently at UNC.

His laboratory is committed to open science through building open-source research software, making experimental data unconditionally available, and disseminating results quickly through blog posts and preprints. Recent research highlights include advancements in neoantigen prediction tools like LENS, investigations into DNA variant standardization, and comparative studies of vaccine formulations in mouse models.

• Novocure Career Development Award from AACR (2020)
• Grant from Rare Cancer Research Foundation (2024)
• Grant from Jaime Leandro Foundation (2025)

Dr. Rubinsteyn actively collaborates with experimentalists to optimize vaccine formulation and has helped develop numerous open-source computational tools including Vaxrank, Isovar, Topiary, MHCflurry, and MHCdouble. His work on the PANDA-VAC trial represents the next generation of personalized cancer vaccines at UNC, building on his previous experience with the PGV series of therapeutic cancer vaccine trials at Mount Sinai.