Personalized cancer therapies driven by AI

[Music]

[Music]

let me give you a sneak peek

into the future in the future

everything will be truly personalized in

the future

we will be designing one therapy for

each individual patient

personalization is now becoming a

reality due to the advancements in

artificial intelligence or ai

ai is enabling us to develop cancer

therapy that are specifically tailored

to the individual patient

based on the genetic code or the dna of

the individual

we can use the wealth of information

contained within the dna of the

individual

to tailor the therapy to that specific

cancer patient

but now you may ask yourselves how do we

get from the dna

of an individual cancer patient to a

personalized cancer therapy

using ai

in order to understand this let’s take a

step back and look at cancer therapy

in a traditional cancer therapy approach

such as chemotherapy

we’re using a one-size-fits-all model

these types of therapies target cancer

non-specifically

which is which causes side effects and

is not always effective in fighting off

the cancer

the challenge however is in cancer and

in tumors

tumors each tumor is unique and we can

argue that a more effective therapy can

be developed if we treat the tumor as

such

in a personalized approach we want to

target each patient

uniquely more importantly we want to

target each

tumor uniquely we basically want to look

at the foreign elements that are

displayed on the surface of the tumor

cells

and target these

these foreign elements arise from

mutations that can be caused by for

example

environmental factors such as sun or

smoking

mutations are completely normal events

in the human body and we have developed

many mechanisms to mitigate the

potentially

dangerous actions that these mutations

can have

however in cancer these one or more

mutational events

have not been mitigated and this can

result

in the development of a potentially

malignant tumor

tumor cells are disguising themselves as

normal

cells this means that tumor cells are

putting up a protective shield

allowing them to attract all the

essential nutrients they need to grow

allowing them to ultimately grow out of

control

the immune system cannot recognize the

tumor cells as foreign

our immune system consists of so-called

t-cells and t-cells constantly

survey the body and monitor whether

there’s any danger looking

they are experts in finding foreign

intruders that are trying to invade the

body

such as bacteria and virus virus such as

the coronavirus which i guess you are

all experts in now in light of the

pandemic

in cancer the tumor should in principle

be just as foreign to the human body

as a virus is but somehow it is not

the tumor goes unnoticed by the immune

system the tumor is in disguise

we want to design personalized cancer

therapy that helps the immune system

see the tumor we want to help the immune

system see the foreign elements

on the surface of the tumor cells and we

want to

boost an immune response that makes sure

that we have the right t cells present

and enough of the t cells present to

actually fight off the tumor

in a personalized cancer therapy what we

want to do is we want to develop a

therapy specifically designed

based on the genetic code of the dna of

the individual

patient we want to bring this these

foreign elements that are on the surface

of the tumor we want to bring them out

in the open

and the way we do that in a personalized

cancer therapy approach

is actually by providing the body with

more of this foreign material

exactly as we would do in a vaccine

against coronavirus

so let me illustrate what these foreign

elements actually are

these foreign elements are what we call

neo-epitopes

or new epitopes and epitopes are small

molecules that are displayed on the

surface of our cells

in complex with a specialized immune

molecule called

mhc neo-epitopes

or new epitopes have arisen from

mutations in our dna

and then they are displayed on the

surface of the cells in complex with

these mhc

each cancer patient or each tumor of

each cancer patient

is defined by a unique set of neopotents

and also each patient has a unique set

of mhc

it’s only a subset of the molecules that

are bound to the mhc or displayed on the

surface by mhc

that are actually neopotopes and

identifying these

of uh is a hugely complex task also

the immune system being able to see

these is also

a highly complex task for the immune

system

imagine that these neops are screaming

at the top

of their lungs trying to inform the

immune system that there is danger

the neoprobes are trying to tell the

immune system that is something wrong

with this cell

there’s something wrong with this tumor

cell and that they should immediately

kill

the cell the problem is however

that these this signal that the neotopes

are trying to convey is drowning in

other single

signals provided by the the tumor cell

but also

surrounding the tumor cell that results

in the knee octop signal not being heard

what we want to do in a neoprete-based

personalized

cancer therapy is we want to shift this

balance

and we want to amplify the dangerous

signal

basically allowing the immune system to

be able to

hear the voices of the neopets we want

to provide the neopotopes

with a megaphone in order for the immune

system to be able to hear them better

in order to fight off the tumor

let me try to visualize how we would

design

such a personalized cancer therapy

this you see here is a cancer patient

or more specifically this is the healthy

dna of a cancer patient

this is the dna of the tumor of this

specific cancer patient

what we want to do is we want to

identify these mutations that are unique

to the tumor of this specific patient

and the way in which we do that is

overlay the dna of the tumor with the

dna of the healthy tissue

in order to isolate the mutations

this results in potentially a list of

thousands of mutations

and what we want to do is we want to

based on these thousands of mutations

we want to identify which of those are

actually displayed on the surface of

cells

and and are able to interact with the

immune system in order to inform that

this tumor

is actually a tumor cell so what we want

to do is we want to find the needle in

the haystack

we want to find the neotopes that will

be displayed on the surface

and this is a challenging task in

principle what we want to do is we want

to actually test each of these mutations

in the lab

we want to test whether they are

displayed on the cell surface and we

also want to test whether they are

they have the ability to interact with

the immune system

however as you can imagine doing this

testing all of these in the lab would is

a highly complex task

would take very long time and is

therefore not feasible

so we need other tools to identify these

neops and this is where ai comes into

the picture

an ai algorithm in the context of

neopitot identification is trained on

vast biological data sets that contain

information about

molecules that are displayed on the

source of cells and we can use that

information

to identify our neotopes an example of

such data

is that we take cells from

lots and lots thousands and thousands of

different people

we then strip the surface of these cells

for the for their epitopes

as you can imagine this results in an

extremely long list of epitopes

what we want to do with ai is we want to

look at this really long list of

epitopes

and we want the ai to identify patterns

in these

epitopes that will allow us to look at

similar patterns in neotopes

in order to figure out what is actually

presented on the cell’s surface

what we do with our ai algorithm when we

see when we get a new patient and we

want to see

what neopotopes i are unique to this

patient’s tumor

is that we use our ai and the ai uses

all its past

experience that it’s learned from all of

the other data it’s seen

and it uses that past experience to

figure out for this specific patient

which neo-epitopes should we be bringing

out into into the open

which neopetopes which voices should we

be amplifying

in order for the immune system to be

able to spot the tumor

once we’ve identified our neopotopes

with our ai algorithm

we can go back into the lab and we can

then make more of these

neops synthetically we can then put

these neopotopes

into our personalized cancer therapy and

give this back to the patient

in order to amplify the danger signal

and for the patient’s

own immune system to be able to fight

off the cancer

let me finish off by telling you a story

about tomorrow

based on many of the things that we can

already do today

after many years in the sun mostly

without sun protection

my grandmother harriet has developed

skin cancer

she visits the hospital and the hospital

decides that

a personalized cancer approach would be

the way to go for her

a tumor biopsy and a blood sample is

taken from my grandmother

and this is the material we need to

design personalized therapy specific for

her

once she is waiting for her therapy to

be produced we’ll take a look behind the

scenes

and see how do we actually produce this

personalized cancer therapy

we look at the dna of the healthy tissue

of my grandmother

and we look at the dna of our tumor and

this is what we use to identify the

computational

or computationally identify the

mutational landscape of her tumor

specifically

we can use the blood sample to identify

the mhc the immune molecules that are

specific to her

once we have this information we can

then use ai to extract the neopotopes

that are specific to her tumor

these computational steps can ach can be

achieved within a matter of hours

once we’ve identified identified on

neoprotops

we can go back into the lab synthesize

them

make a personalized cancer therapy

specific for my grandmother

and when she comes back to the hospital

she can be given her therapy

and after some time my grandmother’s own

immune system will be able to fight

off the cancer

just imagine this world of tomorrow a

world

where personalization is the norm and

where each cancer patient can be treated

specifically based on his or her tumor

a world where each cancer patient can be

given a cancer cancer treatment

with no off-target toxicities and with

high effectiveness in fighting off

the in the body that is the cancer

tailor-made personalized cancer therapy

driven by ai can potentially make this

reality

thank you

[Applause]

you