Expanding neoantigen discovery with COSMIC

Presented By: Kyle Nilson, PhD, Rebecca Steele, Ph.D. & Jennifer Wilding, Ph.D.
Speaker Biography:
Kyle Nilson, PhD, is a sequencing-focused molecular biologist with a background in biochemistry and technical support. As a field software trainer at QIAGEN Digital Insights, Dr. Nilson works closely with QIAGEN’s global bioinformatics team to provide direct customer support and assist with software training, implementation, and optimization. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Iowa, where he studied the regulation of RNA polymerase II transcription and co-transcriptional mRNA processing. Dr. Nilson then completed his postdoctoral training at Penn State and Cornell University, focusing exclusively on next-generation sequencing method development to study chromatin.
Dr. Rebecca Steele joined COSMIC in 2023 and is a Clinical Curator for COSMIC Actionability, where she adds the latest biomarker-driven clinical trial data into the COSMIC database. Prior to joining the COSMIC team, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast and at The Institute for Cancer Research, where her research was focused on prostate and breast cancer genomics.
Jenny Wilding is a Scientist Curator for COSMIC (Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer). She obtained her Ph.D in 2001 and spent 18 years at the University of Oxford as the Senior Scientist in Prof. Sir Walter Bodmer’s laboratory. Her research focused on a range of projects including studying the mechanisms that control cancer stemness, lineage commitment and differentiation, regulation of EMT (Epithelial Mesenchymal Transition), epigenetic dysregulation, analyses of expression profiles, biomarker identification, and genetic profiling of tumour heterogeneity in colorectal cancer. She joined the COSMIC science team in 2019 where she helps with product testing and design and exploring the utility of COSMIC tools for different user groups.
Webinar: Expanding neoantigen discovery with COSMIC
Webinar Abstract:
Neoantigens are among the newest promising targets for cancer treatment. Unlike tumor-associated antigens, neoantigens are produced only by tumor cells. These unique molecular markers are highly visible to the immune system, making them ideal for personalized immunotherapies. They may also be able to predict both tumor survival prognosis and immune checkpoint blockade responses. Neoantigens are presented by human leukocyte antigen class I molecules (HLA-I) to T cells, providing an ideal pathway for detection by shotgun proteomics. To identify these elusive targets, scientists often rely on whole exome sequencing (WES)-derived data. However, this approach can miss rare or low-frequency mutations, especially in cancers with a low tumor mutational burden (TMB).
The Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) can bridge this gap by providing researchers with detailed information about somatic mutations in human cancer. Unlock the full potential of neoantigen-targeted therapies and enhance traditional approaches like WES with our comprehensive, expert-curated knowledge base.
In this webinar, we’ll learn to:
Uncover and validate potential neoantigens with a recent peer-reviewed study that uses COSMIC mutation data from human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a low-TMB cancer
Apply the benchmarking results of neoantigen detection performance using HCC-specific variants from COSMIC or DepMap
Take full advantage of the breadth and accuracy of COSMIC data with downloaded content and other resources
Labroots on Social:
Facebook: / labrootsinc
Twitter: / labroots
LinkedIn: / labroots
Instagram: / labrootsinc
Pinterest: / labroots
SnapChat: labroots_inc