ESMO IO 2024: AI-designed cancer vaccines: antigens from the dark genome are promising cancer vaccine targets
ESMO IO 2024: AI-designed cancer vaccines: antigens from the dark genome are promising cancer vaccine targets
Personalized cancer vaccines targeting patients’ tumor mutations, so-called neoantigens, have significantly advanced cancer treatment. However, the use of neoantigens is restricted to tumors with sufficiently high mutational burden, limiting their use to selected clinical indications. The discovery of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) as relevant immunologic features contained in the dark genome and the research demonstrating their dynamic role in cancer development and progression provides potential prospects for therapeutic use. Evaxion Biotech’s AI-ImmunologyTM platform allows for the identification and selection of ERVs as a new antigen source for designing personalized and precision therapeutic cancer vaccines.
In the presented work, we explore the efficacy of AI-ImmunologyTM identified ERVs as alternative antigens for DNA cancer vaccines in preclinical mouse and human cell models. The precision vaccine designs contain multiple ERV protein fragments, defined as ERV hotspot, consisting of one or more MHC allele ligands. This vaccines have the potential to be effective across a wide patient population within the same cancer indication, moving from a personalized to a more precision vaccine approach.
