OSLO, NORWAY-- February 18, 2022 -- NEC OncoImmunity AS (NOI) today announced a publication that describes a novel approach to type new HLA alleles and characterize the HLA of tumors to guide personalized cancer immunotherapy.

The computational approach performs HLA typing from next generation sequencing data by using the current strengths of conventional HLA typing while simultaneously allowing for the discovery of novel HLA alleles and tumor-specific HLA variants, through leveraging proprietary mutation calling bioinformatics at NOI.

NOI collaborated with Ultimovacs ASA in the study to validate the HLA typing approach from the blood of numerous donors using deep targeted HLA sequencing. The validation confirmed almost 100% of HLA typing success at the 1st and 2nd fields of resolution.

The approach was published in the peer review journal HLA where the first author Anzar and her colleagues also demonstrated how the approach led to the discovery of a new officially named HLA allele, from standard sequencing data routinely used in the design of personalized cancer vaccines.

“This approach is an important development in the field of precision immunotherapy. It will help the HLA typing community to fill gaps in the global human HLA libraries, and help identify novel HLA variants in disease association studies in addition to improving the accuracy of HLA-typing for organ transplantation and vaccine design. We will now use this unique addition to our bioinformatics toolbox to further characterize the relationship between variation in HLA alleles and response to cancer immunotherapy.” Said, Dr. Trevor Clancy, Chief Scientific Officer at NEC OncoImmunity.