About University of Helsinki

PeptiCHIP is a novel microchip-based solution that enables rapid, accurate, user-friendly, and standardized tumor neoantigen identification from small tumor biopsies.

By addressing the technological limitations that are a major hurdle for the clinical translation of cancer immunotherapies, it will offer more meaningful and cost-effective neoantigen identification for immunotherapy companies, clinicians, and researchers. The technology is particularly valuable for those looking to validate antigens that can be used for the clinical development of dendritic cell-based therapies, T-cell receptor designs, monoclonal antibody creation, or as the coating of oncolytic viruses.

Personalized cancer immunotherapies that depend on the accurate identification of tumor neoantigens include autologous dendritic cell-based vaccines, neoantigen-specific antibodies, and neoantigen-coated oncolytic viral vectors. However, currently available neoantigen identification methods have significant limitations: they are time-consuming (weeks to months), laborious, expensive, and inaccurate, as they rely on the prediction of MHC-mediated peptide presentation. Alternative direct chromatography-based detection techniques are available, but their requirement for tumor material far exceeds the quantities obtained in tissue biopsies, preventing clinical neoantigen analysis altogether. Moreover, very few laboratories are sufficiently equipped to identify neoantigens, which impedes research and development of novel neoantigen-based immunotherapies.