Citation
Pero, S.C., Shukla, G.S., Sun, Y., Barrantes-Reynolds, R., Hartman, C.J., Ackerman, M.E., Mei, L., Zhang, F., Fournier, M.R., & Krag, D.N. (2026). Novel antibody cocktail therapy targeting extracellular tumor-specific mutations to treat EMT6 cell line-derived triple-negative breast cancer. Scientific Reports, 16, 16397.
Summary
This is the result of a long-standing collaboration with an excellent cancer research group. This study demonstrates a proof-of-concept towards personalized immunotherapy approach using customized antibody cocktails that target patient-specific tumor mutations. This study focused on mice, and developed a triple negative breast cancer mouse model and showed that a particular antibody cocktail targeting membrane surface proteins (MSPs) delayed tumor growth and improved survival. My role was to examine TCGA cancer tumor/normal pairs, and determine if there were enough tumor-specific mutations to serve as candidates for a potential personalized antibody therapy.
This work involved downloading large amounts of variant information for tumor/normal pairs, while writing programs in R that would interface TCGA and Uniprot data. This work, started several years ago, laid the foundation for the more streamlined multiomics variant filtering, annotation pipelines I’ve developed since.