Predicting MHC I restricted T cell epitopes in mice with NAP-CNB, a novel online tool

• Main Authors: Carlos Wert-Carvajal, Rubén Sánchez-García, José R Macías, Rebeca Sanz-Pamplona, Almudena Méndez Pérez, Ramon Alemany, Esteban Veiga, Carlos Óscar S. Sorzano, Arrate Muñoz-Barrutia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2021-05-01
• Series: Scientific Reports
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89927-5

Abstract Lack of a dedicated integrated pipeline for neoantigen discovery in mice hinders cancer immunotherapy research. Novel sequential approaches through recurrent neural networks can improve the accuracy of T-cell epitope binding affinity predictions in mice, and a simplified variant selection process can reduce operational requirements. We have developed a web server tool (NAP-CNB) for a full and automatic pipeline based on recurrent neural networks, to predict putative neoantigens from tumoral RNA sequencing reads. The developed software can estimate H-2 peptide ligands, with an AUC comparable or superior to state-of-the-art methods, directly from tumor samples. As a proof-of-concept, we used the B16 melanoma model to test the system’s predictive capabilities, and we report its putative neoantigens. NAP-CNB web server is freely available at http://biocomp.cnb.csic.es/NeoantigensApp/ with scripts and datasets accessible through the download section.