Thursday, September 9, 2021

Bispecific antibodies -- How to ruin a cancer cell's day with a neo-antigen!

 


I guess this isn't new news, but it's news to me! Hard copies of Science kind of arbitrarily end up on different coffee tables and I don't always get to flip through in order. This overview of the field and the promise it has is from March is a solid and approachable read

Importantly for me, it helped put this other paper I've been thinking about here and there into context and suddenly -- it all clicked. (Don't you love when those disparate neurons realize they're all related and it all falls into place?) 


You know how we're all called on from time to time to identify those awful MHC, HLA, endogenous peptide, surface neo-antigen things? If you have you've probably been at a point where you've struggled through it all and handed over a list to someone and:

A) You never hear from them again and you might wonder what they are going to do with it

or 

B) (Way way worse) they ask you something like "okay, which one should I spend a lot of time, money  and resources validating?"

In this study you see behind the scenes and get a glimpse of both answers! 

This group prioritizes the neo-antigen targets through a process called MANA-MRM! 

Then they build a bi-specific antibody to the neo-antigens and totally f' up some cancer cells with it! 

As much fun as it is to bicker about trypsin concentrations and p-values, I will admit that I get a lot of inspiration from the couple papers a year that show LCMS can address biological or medical challenges. 😇

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