Quality over quantity

A study in Nature has challenged the assumption that pancreatic cancers are poorly immunogenic by linking long-term survival in patients to the quality, not the quantity, of neoantigens in expressed their tumors, highlighting the antigens’ potential as both markers and therapeutic targets for the disease.

“People have hypothesized that neoantigens are probably not the antigenic targets in pancreatic cancer because the mutation rates are so low,” said study author Vinod Balachandran, a surgeon and member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “Our findings suggested that neoantigen number by itself didn’t capture immunogenicity.”...