Dr. Benjamin Greenbaum co authored the paper, “Neoantigen quality predicts immunoediting in survivors of pancreatic cancer” along with Marta Łuksza et al. in the journal Nature . In it they investigate how 70 human pancreatic cancers evolved over 10 years. They find that, despite having more time to accumulate mutations, rare long-term survivors of pancreatic cancer who have stronger T cell activity in primary tumours develop genetically less heterogeneous recurrent tumours with fewer immunogenic mutations (neoantigens). To quantify whether immunoediting underlies these observations, they infer that a neoantigen is immunogenic (high-quality) by two features—‘non-selfness’ based on neoantigen similarity to known antigens4,5, and ‘selfness’ based on the antigenic distance required for a neoantigen to differentially bind to the MHC or activate a T cell compared with its wild-type peptide.
You can read the paper in Nature here.