Back

Fusion-derived phospho-neoepitopes define a prioritized candidate neoantigen repertoire in MASLD-HCC

Zhao, L. N.; Andersen, J.

2026-08-27 cancer biology
10.64898/2026.08.26.747243 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Background: The rising burden of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD)-associated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) underscores the need for innovative therapeutic strategies. Methods: We integrated RNA-seq fusion detection, immunopeptidomics, and proteogenomics to systematically prioritize tumor-specific neoantigen candidates arising from gene fusions in MASLD-HCC. Results: We elucidated a landscape of private, clonally expressed fusions, and identified a previously unrecognized class of predicted phosphorylated fusion-neoepitopes. Cross-tumor proteomic analysis revealed that these phospho-motifs are present across malignancies, providing a broader context for their biological relevance. Importantly, fusion-positive tumors display immunosuppressive microenvironments, highlighting the need for future therapeutic strategies that combine fusion-targeted immunotherapy with approaches that overcome T-cell dysfunction. Conclusions: This study establishes a discovery pipeline and publicly available resource for fusion-derived phospho-neoepitopes in MASLD-HCC. The identified candidates provide a prioritized framework to guide and accelerate rigorous functional immunogenicity testing for future clinical validation.

Matching journals

The top 13 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.