Cathy Wu

The overall goals of this NIH grant involve characterizing the effects of leukemia-specific spliceosome mutations on mRNA splicing and its resultant effect on protein isoform production and epitope presentation. The study aims to develop methods that could be applied for the development of patient-specific T-cell therapeutics. Specifically, Dr. Wu’s lab will infer HLA typing from RNAseq data and predict immunogenic peptides that bind to the personal HLA alleles of patient samples that have been identified from tumor-specific splice isoforms. Dr. Wu’s lab will focus on T cell studies related to testing the immunogenic potential of the predicted binding peptides from CLL patients.

Neon Therapeutics has licensed technology to develop personalized neoantigen cancer vaccines. The goal of the company is to develop cancer vaccines specifically designed for individual patients by first sequencing the individual’s tumor and then synthesizing a unique peptide based on the tumor’s sequence to then use as a vaccine in the patient. Dr. Wu has acknowledged the potential for conflict of interest between her SFI and this research as follows “The findings of this study would add to the general knowledge of neoantigen biology, and could potentially be of interest to Neon (as would any facet of neoantigen biology), but would not be the purpose of the study.”