Carl Jorns

The covid-19 pandemic has created tremendous damage to the world´s economy and society, but it has also highlighted the importance of science and innovations as tools to survive and respond to life treatening challenges. Vaccines based on mRNA technology have been massively manufactured and administered, dissipating any doubg about the feasibility of this approach. This technology has been initially developed to target cancer antigens and had shown promising results in small clinical trials. Vaccination is one of the most succesfull form of immunotherapy and can be directed towards multiple antigens, the challenge in the filed of cancer immunotherapy is to identify the right target to achieve tumor eradication. In 2020 our team started a project focused on the identification of immunogeneic neoantigens in patients affected by HCC. At today we collected and sequenced tumors from 16 individulas and we identified several neoantigens that can raise a T cell response in the patients. With the present project we aim at complementing the screening of T cell immunogeic neoantigens with the design of specifc mRNA vaccines that can elicit immune response as support/integration of adoptive cell therapy.