TSNAD: an integrated software for cancer somatic mutation and tumour-specific neoantigen detection

Abstract

Tumour antigens have attracted much attention because of their importance to cancer diagnosis, prognosis and targeted therapy. With the development of cancer genomics, the identification of tumour-specific neoantigens became possible, which is a crucial step for cancer immunotherapy. In this study, we developed software called the tumour-specific neoantigen detector for detecting cancer somatic mutations following the best practices of the genome analysis toolkit and predicting potential tumour-specific neoantigens, which could be either extracellular mutations of membrane proteins or mutated peptides presented by class I major histocompatibility complex molecules. This pipeline was beneficial to the biologist with little programmatic background. We also applied the software to the somatic mutations from the International Cancer Genome Consortium database to predict numerous potential tumour-specific neoantigens. This software is freely available from https://github.com/jiujiezz/tsnad.

Keywords

• cancer somatic mutation
• tumour antigen
• neoantigen
• major histocompatibility complex
• membrane protein