neoANT-HILL: an integrated tool for identification of potential neoantigens
Neoantigens. Cancer. Immunogenomic Analysis.
Neoantigens have generated great interest in immunotherapy due to their ability to elicit antitumor immunologic responses. Neoantigens arises as consequences of specific tumor mutations and can be recognized by the T cells from the immune system. Preclinical studies in humans indicated promising results regarding the use of neoantigens for the development of immunotherapeutic vaccines. The aim of this study was to develop a computational tool that integrates fundamental immunogenomic analyses for the identification and classification of neoantigens. The tool, called neoANT-HILL, was developed in the Python programming language with a user-friendly and interactive graphical user interface (GUI). The neoANT-HILL tool is flexible as to the input data accepting genomic and/or RNA-Seq. From these data, neoANT-HILL is able to identify tumor-specific somatic mutations, translating the corresponding altered protein sequences, perform in silico typing of the HLA alleles of class I, estimating the abundance of the altered transcripts in the tumor, characterizing the tumor immunological profile and estimating the binding affinity between the HLA alleles and the altered peptides. The association of the results from all these immunogenomic analyses assists the identification and classification of neonatal potential candidates for immunotherapy.