First Author Conversations

In this episode, Dr. Geoffrey Lynn talks about the development of a polymer-based antigen delivery technology- SNAP, or self-assembling nanoparticles, displaying a patient’s own neoantigens to induce a CD8 T-cell response and tumor regression in animal models. The work was published on Nature Biotechnology on Jan. 13th 2020, “Peptide–TLR-7/8a conjugate vaccines chemically programmed for nanoparticle self-assembly enhance CD8 T-cell immunity to tumor antigens”.Geoff first introduced personalized cancer vaccines. He then explained how one class of therapies- checkpoint inhibitors unleashes the immune system to attack cancer.“Now the reason why precision medicine or personalized therapy is important is because… each cancer is going to have a unique set of mutations…, if we want to leverage the immune system, we may have to target a unique set of cancer antigens or these mutations which are often referred to as neoantigens”.By sequencing DNA and RNAs from a tumor, as well as using bioinformatics methods, one can