Dissecting Melanoma Neoantigen Immunity

Beatriz discusses the use of cancer vaccines to transition ‘cold’ tumors in patients to ‘hot’ tumors. The UPenn group used Next Gen Sequencing to catalog tumor mutations and generated autologous dendritic cell vaccines to evaluate the immunogenicity of missense mutations and define the nature of patient T cells specific for melanoma neoantigens. They found that that immunological ignorance of clonal neoantigens is the basis for ineffective T cell immunity to melanoma and that therapeutic vaccination as an adjunct to checkpoint inhibitor treatment, should be considered to increase the breadth and diversity of neoantigen-specific CD8+ T cells.