Exact knowledge of which neoepitopes are presented by tumor cells are essential. Classical mass spectrometric strategies are limited by sensitivity or throughput and can rarely detect any neoepitopes.
Alithea’s NEOZOOM™ strategy was developed to increase sensitivity and detectability of neoepitopes and clearly outperforms classical strategies. It represents a multi-step bioinformatic strategy to detect high confidence variant peptides from thousands of potential 8-12mer neoantigens.

The strategy was implemented and validated with immunopeptidomes of cultured cells where genetic data was available. Below is an example of the results obtained facilitating the increased neoantigen detection from 0 hits (via DDA) to 14 hits (via NeoZOOM).
The increase in sensitivity is especially important as neoantigens are typically under-represented in immunopeptidomics dataset and 0-5 neoantigens are typically detected in published studies.