Neoantigen Vaccines for Personalized Immunotherapy

Despite the immense promise of cancer immunotherapies, significant challenges have been mounting to overcome treatment resistance and to improve efficacy. Strategies such as the combination immunotherapies of existing agents have so far yielded more failures than successes in this effort, highlighting the importance of developing the novel next generation immunotherapy agents.  
Neoantigens are peptides derived from patient-specific and tumor-specific mutations, which can be recognized by the immune system and mediate tumor recognition that leads to immune destruction of the cancer. Neoantigens are emerging as one of the next generation immuno-oncology targets with tremendous potentials. In this talk, I will introduce the definition, identification, prioritization of the neoantigens using tumor sequencing data. I’ll describe the REAL-neo bioinformatics pipeline and several on-going clinical trials of neoantigen vaccine therapies.  

Learning Objectives: 

1. Discuss the source of neoantigen in cancer.

2. Identify the steps of neoantigen identification using bioinformatics tools from sequencing data.

3. Visualize features of "good" neoantigen candidates.