AI and Its Involvement in the Future of Neoantigen Discovery
The overabundance of data, constantly developing data acquisition technologies, and the rise of applied AI are significantly accelerating cancer neoantigen immunotherapy research.
Targeting specificity is one of the greatest barriers in the fight for curing cancer. Over the past decade, immunotherapies have experienced a considerable rise in attention due to their successful targeting abilities. One of the more promising immunotherapeutic methods is neoantigen therapy. This cancer cell targeting approach is based on discriminating cellular neoantigens or peptides that incite an immune response from those that do not. Cancer cells produce non-functional proteins, whose proteasome digested peptide by-products can be used by the immune system for pathogenic cell identification. The process of identifying peptides that can be used in this manner, i.e., neoantigens in cancer cells, identify the genes that are used to encode them.