AI-designed therapies & diagnostics in oncology and infectious disease

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

Cancer & infectious diseases remain leading causes of death and morbidity worldwide and better methods for preventing and treating these diseases are needed. NOI is developing AI- solutions that model the human immune system and can be used to identify immunogenic antigens & neoantigens for developing prophylactic & therapeutic vaccines. The challenge in oncology is that each patient has a unique immune system, and each patient’s tumor has a unique mutational profile. Consequently, each patient requires a be-spoke vaccine, containing neoantigens that will be presented by their tumors’ immunopeptidome. This necessitates the use of advanced AI algorithms that can identify the correct neoantigens and combine them in an optimal arrangement to maximize immunogenicity, while minimizing off-target responses. The challenge in the infectious disease field is to develop universal vaccines that can protect the global population against a specific type of pathogen, but also induce cross-reactive responses that protect against multiple variants, and related pathogens within the same family. This necessitates the use advanced AI algorithms that can identify “cross protective” epitopes, & subsequently identify the optimal combination of epitopes to provide protection in the global population. During this project NOI will continue to develop and refine its AI-technology to improve its accuracy & extend its capabilities, whilst applying the technology to develop novel therapies. For oncology, this will involve making improvements to the neoantigen prediction and methods used to combine targets together in a vaccine construct to maximize their immunogenicity whilst minimizing autoimmunity and testing these in the clinic. For the infectious disease field, this will involve further development of the AI-stack to improve population and pathogenic variation modelling and applying the technology to design novel vaccine blueprints & novel diagnostics which will be tested in the clinic.