NEC Bio B.V.
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Focus Areas
The development of groundbreaking therapies starts with a thorough understanding of the disease. Explore NEC Bio's endeavors in combating cancers and infectious diseases using advanced ML technology.
Oncology
Personalized Cancer Vaccines
Therapeutic cancer vaccines are therapies intended to stimulate the immune system of patients with cancer to treat a cancer that is already diagnosed. Therapeutic cancer vaccines are to be differentiated from prophylactic vaccines intended to prevent the onset of a disease. AI/ML algorithms are used to identify cancer specific genomic alterations likely to lead to the expression of cancer specific antigens. These antigens are evaluated for their potential immunogenicity and can be used to design and manufacture a patient tailored cancer specific vaccine. This vaccine is intended to stimulate the capacity of the patient’s immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells.
Neoantigens Open the Way to Personalized Cancer Immunotherapy
Immune mediated cancer therapies have revolutionized cancer care over the last decade allowing tremendous improvement in patient outcomes. Recent advances in immuno-oncology research has demonstrated that antigens resulting from the expression of cancer mutated genes are the cornerstone of immune mediated cancer rejection. The increased access to next generation sequencing provides each patient with a detailed knowledge of the cancer genetic landscape. This information can then be mined using AI engines to predict which are the antigens that are the most likely to drive a clinical effect and to be used to manufacture a therapeutic vaccine.
Enabling the Prediction of True Immunogenic Neoantigens
Only a small number of cancer genomic alterations are likely to be efficient targets for the immune system. These "true targets" are referred to as bona fide cancer neoantigens. Identification of these targets by laboratory methods is difficult, laborious and time consuming. In silico machine learning based approaches offer a powerful alternative. However, serious computational challenges need to be overcome in order to predict true neoantigens from NGS data, above and beyond what can currently be achieved by binding to the cancer patient’s HLA molecules.
AI Makes Inroads to Predicting Antigen Presentation
AI has made inroads toward the goal of predicting antigen presentation and subsequent immunogenicity. Proprietary developments by the NEC Bio team fill the existing machine-learning gaps and predict antigen presentation on the cell surface to facilitate automated screening of epitopes for their immunogenic and clinical potential.
Applications in Personalized Cancer Immunotherapy
NEC Bio's technology has been used in several clinical trials and has been shown efficient at identifying immunogenic and clinically relevant neoantigens in cancer patients.
What are Neoantigens?
The human immune system identifies certain peptides, known as antigens, to trigger an immune response. The specific antigens that arise from cancer mutations are called neoantigens because they are uniquely expressed in tumor cells. Because neoantigens are restricted to cancer cells, they present an ideal target for selectively attacking cancer while sparing normal tissues.
Infectious Diseases
Universal Vaccines
NEC uses AI algorithms to develop vaccines that are both safe and that consistently offer broad protection against a wide array of strains—or even entire pathogen families—rather than focusing on a single strain or variant. These algorithms emphasize elements found in conserved regions of the pathogen’s proteome to identify the optimal combination of "universal vaccine elements" that will elicit the most effective immune response in the widest possible segment of the human population.
