Article Text

Download PDFPDF

57 Precision neoantigen discovery using novel algorithms and expanded HLA-ligandome datasets
  1. Dattatreya Mellacheruvu,
  2. Rachel Pyke,
  3. Charles Abbott,
  4. Nick Phillips,
  5. Sejal Desai,
  6. Rena McClory,
  7. John West,
  8. Richard Chen and
  9. Sean Boyle
  1. Personalis Inc., Menlo Park, CA, USA

Abstract

Background Accurately identified neoantigens can be effective therapeutic agents in both adjuvant and neoadjuvant settings. A key challenge for neoantigen discovery has been the availability of accurate prediction models for MHC peptide presentation. We have shown previously that our proprietary model based on (i) large-scale, in-house mono-allelic data, (ii) custom features that model antigen processing, and (iii) advanced machine learning algorithms has strong performance. We have extended upon our work by systematically integrating large quantities of high-quality, publicly available data, implementing new modelling algorithms, and rigorously testing our models. These extensions lead to substantial improvements in performance and generalizability. Our algorithm, named Systematic HLA Epitope Ranking Pan Algorithm (SHERPA™), is integrated into the ImmunoID NeXT Platform®, our immuno-genomics and transcriptomics platform specifically designed to enable the development of immunotherapies.

Methods In-house immunopeptidomic data was generated using stably transfected HLA-null K562 cells lines that express a single HLA allele of interest, followed by immunoprecipitation using W6/32 antibody and LC-MS/MS. Public immunopeptidomics data was downloaded from repositories such as MassIVE and processed uniformly using in-house pipelines to generate peptide lists filtered at 1% false discovery rate. Other metrics (features) were either extracted from source data or generated internally by re-processing samples utilizing the ImmunoID NeXT Platform.

Results We have generated large-scale and high-quality immunopeptidomics data by using approximately 60 mono-allelic cell lines that unambiguously assign peptides to their presenting alleles to create our primary models. Briefly, our primary ‘binding’ algorithm models MHC-peptide binding using peptide and binding pockets while our primary ‘presentation’ model uses additional features to model antigen processing and presentation. Both primary models have significantly higher precision across all recall values in multiple test data sets, including mono-allelic cell lines and multi-allelic tissue samples. To further improve the performance of our model, we expanded the diversity of our training set using high-quality, publicly available mono-allelic immunopeptidomics data. Furthermore, multi-allelic data was integrated by resolving peptide-to-allele mappings using our primary models. We then trained a new model using the expanded training data and a new composite machine learning architecture. The resulting secondary model further improves performance and generalizability across several tissue samples.

Conclusions Improving technologies for neoantigen discovery is critical for many therapeutic applications, including personalized neoantigen vaccines, and neoantigen-based biomarkers for immunotherapies. Our new and improved algorithm (SHERPA) has significantly higher performance compared to a state-of-the-art public algorithm and furthers this objective.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.