I’m Damon May (LinkedIn), a machine learning researcher and computational immunologist. I was most recently at Adaptive Biotechnologies, in both leadership (Associate Director) and individual contributor (Principal Scientist, most recently) roles, building ML models on immune receptor repertoires.
Here, I’m sharing insights about a new resource my colleagues and I made available in July 2026: The CMV ECOcluster. We mined more than 30,000 T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoires to find ECOclusters: groups of TCRs that tend to occur in the same people. Each ECOcluster putatively represents humanity’s collective, shared response to a virus, bacterium or other prevalent exposure (explainer in DIA Global Forum). We described ECOclusters in this preprint, with a major update in July 2026.
The CMV ECOcluster (direct download) is a sensitive, specific, quantitative biomarker of response to Cytomegalovirus (CMV). Each of its 52,447 TCRs is associated with the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) allele that presents the CMV peptide it binds. So, those 52,447 TCRs: let’s see ’em, vividly.
Some practicalities:
- I’ll post new analyses here and announce them on my LinkedIn
- You can also subscribe to email notifications via ButtonDown
- All the code is in the GitHub repo. See About for how to run it yourself.
- Is there an analysis you’d like to see done here? Suggest it.
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