The cancer vaccine is the frontier of cancer immunotherapy. The biggest challenge in cancer vaccine development is accurately identifying neoantigens, which are the determining factor for the clinical outcome of the therapy. The current approaches often depend on the Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) of patients’ DNA, and using software to predict possible MHC peptide ligands containing mutations from protein coding regions. However, protein coding regions only account for 1.5% of the human genome, and the whole exon DNA sequencing approach miss the neoantigens derived from the 98.5% of the non-coding region, while there is growing scientific evidence indicating that many neoantigens can originate from non-coding regions of the human genome.

Furthermore, due to the presence of around 45,000 of MHC gene types within the human population, software predicting neoantigens has a low success rate and is the potential cause behind many failed cancer vaccine clinic trials.

Based on ProtTech’s cutting-edge mass spectrometry technique, ProtTech has developed the technology platform to directly de novo sequence the MHC peptide ligands isolated from cancer patients samples without need of genomic DNA sequencing. This approach is capable of identifying neoantigens from both coding regions and non-coding regions of the human genome, as well as from the genomes of many human viruses. We have also developed vector systems for making polyA-tailed mRNA coding for multiple neoantigens, as well as all the necessary enzymes (T7 RNA polymerase, mRNA capping enzyme, O-methyl transferase, etc) for the production of mRNA based cancer vaccines.

Please contact us if you are interested in ProtTech’s Neoantigen Discovery and Cancer Vaccine Development.