Cancer vaccines are a promising new treatment that help the immune system find and destroy cancer cells. These vaccine work by teaching the body to recognize special signals, called neoantigens, that appear only on cancer cells. Most cancer vaccines today use neoantigens caused by changes in DNA. But because these changes are different for each person, it is hard to make a vaccine that works for everyone. Our research aims to develop a more widely useful cancer vaccine for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), a fast-growing and hard-to-treat cancer. We are studying a new type of neoantigens, that comes from a mistake in how cells process RNA. Normally, cells remove parts of RNA called introns before making proteins. But in some cancer cells, this process fails when a protein called hnRNPM is missing. As a result, the introns stay in, leading to unusual protein pieces that the immune system can recognize and attack. Our team includes experts in RNA, data science, and vaccine development. We are working together to find common neoantigens in TNBC that come from faulty introns and to make a strong mRNA cancer vaccine. We will look for the most common neoantigens made this way in TNBC and build better tools to find neoantigens that current methods miss. We will create mRNA vaccines that teach the immune system to attack these cancer signals. If this works, the vaccine could help treat TNBC and possibly other cancers that make the same neoantigens.
