Biology subjects

Suchan, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Suchan, M..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Computing tumor specificity of cancer antigen targets by k-mer indexing of healthy tissue transcriptomes

Individualized cancer immunotherapies rely on tumor-specific T-cell antigens, often predicted from somatic mutations as neoantigens. For tumors with low mutational burden, mRNA transcript variants, including gene fusions and novel splice junctions, can serve as important alternative targets. A main challenge in their identification from tumor RNA-seq is to confirm that their expression is tumor-restricted. Although large public collections of healthy-tissue RNA-seq exist, verifying tumor-specific expression requires computationally expensive re-analysis of these data for every novel candidate. To address this, we benchmarked nine k-mer indexing algorithms and developed k4neo, which leverages k-mer indexing of raw RNA-seq reads to compute the tumor specificity of any transcript variant. This mapping-free and transcript-class agnostic approach screens any candidate sequence against 18,960 samples across 51 healthy tissue types. We confirmed k4neos detection accuracy with qRT-PCR and showed that k4neo accurately classifies somatic and germline variants, gene fusions, and isoforms by tumor specificity. Applied to nine tumor cohorts, it nominated a median of 4-80 tumor-specific splice junctions per patient, including recurrent, long-read-confirmed novel antigen candidates. Together, k4neo enables efficient access to large-scale sequencing cohorts and accurately computes tumor specificity for any input transcript sequence, thereby expanding the repertoire of individual and shared cancer antigen targets.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2026

Lung-targeted cytokine-coding RNA-lipoplexes induce T and NK cell-mediated anti-tumor immune response

Lung is a major site of metastases for many primary cancers associated with poor outcomes. A central challenge in cancer immunotherapy is overcoming tumor immune evasion, which limits effective antitumor responses. Here, we investigated whether combinatorial mRNA-encoded cytokine therapy can overcome tumor immune evasion by coordinately engaging innate and adaptive immunity, using murine models of pulmonary metastases. We employed intravenously administered cationic nucleoside-modified mRNA-lipoplexes (RNA-LPX) for targeted delivery of mRNA-encoded cytokines to the lung. The cytokine mix containing interferon-, half-life extended interleukin (IL)-7, and a half-life extended IL-2 variant with reduced CD25-binding modulated the tumor immune microenvironment resulting in a potent and broad anti-tumor response and prolonged survival with good tolerability at the conditions tested. Using cell depletion experiments, we demonstrated that both T and natural killer (NK) cells are crucial mediators of the observed anti-tumor efficacy of the cytokine RNA mix, which induced activation and effector function of NK and T cells, coupled with reduced regulatory T cells (Treg) numbers and Treg activation in the lung. Importantly, antitumor efficacy was maintained in models of impaired antigen presentation, including loss of an immunodominant tumor antigen and MHC class I deficiency, where NK cells served as the primary effectors. The cytokine RNA mix induced immune cell activation in the primary human lung tumor culture, suggesting potential for translational application. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that combinatorial cytokine therapy can drive both antigen-dependent and antigen-independent tumor control for the treatment of lung metastases.

immunology↗

bioRxiv2023

An mRNA-encoded, long-lasting Interleukin-2 restores CD8+ T cell neoantigen immunity in MHC class I-deficient cancers

MHC class I antigen presentation deficiency is considered to be the most prevalent cancer immune escape mechanism. Despite its increasing occurrence, the mechanistic implications, and potential strategies to address this challenge, remain poorly understood. Studying {beta}2-microglobulin (B2M) deficient mouse tumor models, we found that MHC class I loss leads to a substantial immune desertification of the tumor microenvironment (TME) and broad therapeutic resistance to immune-, chemo- and radiotherapy. We show that treatment with long-lasting mRNA-encoded interleukin-2 (IL2) restores an immune cell infiltrated, IFN{gamma}-promoted, highly proinflammatory TME signa-ture, and when combined with a tumor-targeting monoclonal antibody (mAb), can overcome ther-apeutic resistance. Surprisingly, we identified that effectiveness of this treatment is driven by ne-oantigen-specific IFN{gamma}-releasing CD8+ T cells that recognize neoantigens cross-presented by TME-resident activated macrophages that under IL2 treatment acquire augmented antigen presen-tation proficiency along with other M1-phenotype-associated features. Our findings highlight the unexpected importance of restoring neoantigen-specific immune responses in the treatment of cancers with MHC class I deficiencies.

immunology↗

bioRxiv2023

Prediction of tumor-specific splicing from somatic mutations as a source of neoantigen candidates

Splicing is dysregulated in many tumors and may result in tumor-specific transcripts that can encode neoantigens, which are promising targets for cancer immunotherapy. Detecting tumor-specific splicing is challenging because many non-canonical splice junctions identified in tumor transcriptomes also appear in healthy tissues. Here, we developed splice2neo to integrate the predicted splice effects from somatic mutations with splice junctions detected in tumor RNA-seq for individual cancer patients. Splice2neo excludes splice junctions from healthy tissue samples, annotates resulting transcript and peptide sequences, and provides targeted re-quantification of supporting RNA-seq reads. We developed a stringent detection rule to predict splice junctions as mutation-derived targets and identified 1.7 target splice junctions per tumor with a false discovery rate below 5% in a melanoma cohort. We confirmed tumor-specificity using independent, healthy tissue samples. Furthermore, using tumor-derived RNA, we confirmed individual exon skipping events experimentally. Most target splice junctions encoded neoepitope candidates with predicted MHC-I or MHC-II binding. Compared to neoepitope candidates derived from non-synonymous point mutations, the splicing-derived MHC-I neoepitope candidates had a lower self-similarity to corresponding wild-type peptides. In conclusion, we demonstrate that identifying mutation-derived and tumor-specific splice junctions can lead to additional neoantigen candidates to expand the target repertoire for cancer immunotherapies. Key PointsO_LIsplice2neo is a versatile tool for identifying and analyzing of splice junctions as a source of neoantigen candidates C_LIO_LIWe identified mutation-retrieved splice junctions supported by RNA-seq in melanoma samples C_LIO_LIThe predicted target splice junctions exhibited a strong tumor-specificity as they were absent in healthy tissues. C_LIO_LITarget splice junctions often lead to frame-shift peptides and encode promising neoantigen candidates C_LI

bioinformatics↗