September 18, 2017 | Danny Wells, an informatic scientist at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, is featured on this podcast from Cambridge Healthtech Institute for the ImPACT Conference, which runs December 5th to 7th, 2017 in San Diego, California. Topics include scaling up personalized therapies, future clinical applications of neoantigens, and new frontiers in cancer immunotherapy. Here is a sample of the discussion that takes place. Podcast

CHI: Please explain a little about what… the Tumor Neoantigen Selection Alliance, or Tesla, Collaboration is.

Danny Wells:  Tesla is a global research consortium that was founded at the Parker Institute along with our collaborators at the Cancer Research Institute, focused on figuring out how to better identify neoantigens, which, for those maybe unfamiliar, are small pieces of degraded protein inside of a cell that contain a mutation, where these protein peptides would not be found natively in a healthy cell, and they are presented by the tumor, and then allow the immune system to recognize that tumor cell as foreign, and thus serve as a path to recognition of the tumor by the immune system.

The goal with Tesla is really to figure out, for any particular neoantigen, and some tumors like melanomas could have thousands of different, unique neoantigens derived from different mutated genes. What makes a good one? What are the properties of that neoantigen? If it's high expression or high… penetrance throughout the tumor, or strong binding to HLA or what have you. What are those features of a particular eight to 12 mer peptide, that really elicit a very strong anti-tumor immune response.