Modeling Tumor Neoantigens for Predicting Patients' Clinical Outcomes

Tumor neoantigens are critical targets of the host antitumor immune response and their presence play an important role in affecting tumor progressions and immunotherapy treatment response. Neoantigens showed a lot of potential of being applied to clinical treatment. However, systematic study of neoantigens' impact on tumors and patients is still challenging due to the huge diversity of neoantigens, heterogeneity within tumors, and the model to study the pairing between neoantigen-MHC and T cells to identify the neoantigens that truly elicit T cell response. To study the impact of neoantigen-T cell interaction on tumorigenesis, I developed a Bayesian hierarchical model to infer the history of neoantigen-cytotoxic T cell interactions in tumors.