Cancer immunotherapy works by stimulating the body's own immune response to eradicate cancer cells. Over the past few decades, immunotherapy has demonstrated significant efficacy in clinical settings. Neoantigen directed therapies are building upon this success by adding a tool to the therapeutic armamentarium. Neoantigen therapies activate T cells targeting shared or patient-specific cancer epitopes. More recently, new classes of antigens are emerging and paving the way for more efficacious individualized therapy. NEC Bio is fully committed to advancing this field with cutting-edge neoantigen identification and prediction technologies.

NEC Bio provides products that are designed to combine scientifically grounded, analytical rigour with reproducible, timely turnaround.

The sections below detail how this is applied across individualized and shared neoantigen therapies and our delivery platform.

One promising application of AI-powered immunogenomics is individualized neoantigen therapy, which is designed based on the unique genetic mutations in each patient’s tumor. NEC Bio’s AI/ML algorithms analyze each patient’s genomic data to identify neoantigens. The platform predicts not only which peptides are likely to be immunogenic, but also which ones are actually processed and presented by tumor cells. The immunogenic potential of mutated peptides arising from these tumor-specific alterations is assessed through a neoantigen prediction pipeline, and the selected high-confidence antigens are used to design and manufacture a patient-tailored, cancer-specific therapy. This approach is intended to stimulate the capacity of the patient’s immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells.

Advances in sequencing technologies have enabled rapid design of individualized neoantigen therapy based on detailed tumor profiling. While such individualized therapies can incorporate multiple patient-specific epitopes that reflect cancer’s heterogeneity and mutational landscape, they require manufacturing for each patient, raising challenges related to cost and broad accessibility. As an alternative, shared neoantigen therapy that targets shared cancer antigens are attracting increasing interest. However, most conventional neoantigens are highly patient-specific, and only a limited number of recurrent mutations—such as those in cancer driver genes (genes whose mutations drive cancer development and growth)—are shared across a subset of patients.

To address this limitation, NEC Bio is exploring the “dark genome”—previously unexplored regions of the genome—to identify shared neoantigens arising from cancer-specific genomic alterations. Recent studies suggest that some dark-genome-derived antigens can be shared across patients while retaining immunological relevance (*1). By applying its proprietary antigen discovery and prediction technologies, NEC Bio is expanding the repertoire of targetable shared cancer-specific antigens beyond those identified through conventional (also known as canonical) neoantigen discovery.

At NEC Bio, we have developed a proprietary tool that predicts dark-genome-derived antigens, leveraging our unique neoantigen prediction technology. Using this tool in combination with cancer patient samples, we are identifying epitopes that are recurrently observed across patients. By utilizing these shared cancer antigens, we aim to develop off-the-shelf cancer neoantigen therapies.

In addition to our neoantigen discovery technology, NEC is conducting a wide range of research and development, including networks and cyber security, that will contribute to the manufacture and delivery of individualized therapies.