Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are normally silenced in mammalian genomes, however, epigenetic dysregulation can lead to their cancer-specific expression, making them promising vaccine targets
Through a pan-cancer transcriptome analysis, we identify that cancer-specific ERV expression is especially pronounced in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), in line with epigenetic dysregulation being a hallmark of AML.
The AI-Immunology™ is used for identifying the optimal set of ERV-derived protein fragments that would elicit broad T-cell responses in AML patients
AI-Immunology™ takes as input ERV expression levels in AML samples, HLA population frequencies and protein-translation propensity. The protein-translational propensities were established by large-scale analysis of thousands of cancer biopsies and cell lines characterized by ribo-seq, immunopeptidomics and proteomics.
