Webinars and events

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

COSMIC’s scientific and curation team will also answer your questions live during the webinar.

Speaker: Kyle Nilson, PhD

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.