Achilles announces publication on neoantigen immunogenicity prediction

Achilles Therapeutics announced publication of a ‘Comment’ in Nature Cancer that outlines the vast potential of neoantigen immunogenicity prediction, discusses current limitations in the field that limit performance, and proposes a path forward. The article, entitled Breaking the performance ceiling for neoantigen immunogenicity prediction, makes the case that the efficient and accurate selection of immunogenic neoantigens is a critical determinant in neoantigen-based personalized tumor therapies. Selecting which neoantigens to use in drug development based on their immunogenicity is crucial for efficacy of personalized treatments as only a few neoantigens will be clinically relevant. The authors of the ‘Comment’ are all researchers affiliated with the DECOD-Ag consortium of which Achilles Therapeutics is a member. They note recent improvements in computational immunogenicity-prediction models and suggest that the performance of currently available artificial intelligence methods for immunogenicity ranking will be surpassed by robust prediction algorithms built from larger datasets with lower bias. Achilles has built a world-leading, AI-powered PELEUS bioinformatics platform to identify clonal neoantigens from each patient’s unique tumor profile. The proprietary PELEUS platform was developed and validated with sequence data from the landmark TRACERx study led by Achilles co-founder Professor Charles Swanton of the Crick Institute. Achilles has exclusive commercial rights to the TRACERx study, which has generated one of the largest data sets ever collected to analyze tumor evolution.