Team:EPFL
CAPOEIRA
Cancer Personalized Encapsulin Immunotherapy and Relapse Assay
What is CAPOEIRA ?
While Melanoma remains the deadliest form of skin cancer, immunotherapy approaches can harness our immune system to defeat it! Yet, current immuno-treatments suffer from high costs, limited accessibility, and poor specificity. Our project “CAPOEIRA”, named after the Brazilian self-defense martial-art, exploits the potential of synthetic biology to develop a personalized, cost-effective, and rapid production scheme for cancer vaccine and point-of-care relapse surveillance. First, a bioinformatic pipeline integrating state-of-the-art tools identifies our targets: melanoma neoantigens, the fingerprints of cancer cells. Next, cell-free protein expression rapidly synthesizes a library of encapsulin protein nanocompartments presenting the various neoantigen epitopes. This encapsulin vaccine activates dendritic cells which trigger T-cells’ attack on the neoantigen-bearing cancer cells. Nevertheless, we don’t underestimate a defeated villain! To detect potential relapse, we combine techniques including dumbbell probes, rolling circle amplification, isothermal amplification, and CRISPR-Cas12a to detect circulating tumor miRNA and DNA. Ultimately, CAPOEIRA trains the immune system to retaliate!
Detection
Detection of cancer patient specific tumor mutations and neoantigens
Vaccine
Expression of the neoantigens and the adjuvant using encapsulin
Immune response
Maturation of dendritic cells and T-cells
Follow up
Detection of cancer relapse using liquid biopsies of ctDNA and cancer miRNA