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Audio Interview

Unlocking a new class of cancer targets: neoantigens from RNA splicing

Published on August 31, 2026   8 min

A selection of talks on Oncology

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Interviewer: With us today is Prof. Hideho Okada from the University of California, San Francisco, who led a study that was recently published in Nature, identifying a new class of public neoantigens that are widely shared across tumor types, even those with low mutation burdens. Hideho, thank you so much for joining us today. Dr. Okada: Hi, Eyal. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Interviewer: To kick things off, could you briefly explain what neoantigens are and what makes them so promising in the context of cancer immunotherapy? Dr. Okada: To answer that question, let me start with my background of my research interests. I have been dedicated to the development of immunotherapy for brain cancer for a few decades. When I started my work on brain tumor immunotherapy about 30 years ago, not as many people as you may see now believed in cancer immunotherapy. Among those people who believed in cancer immunotherapy at that time, not many of them would believe in immunotherapy for brain tumors, particularly because the brain and the central nervous system (CNS) were considered immunologically privileged. However, there are autoimmune conditions in the brain and the CNS, for example, most models of brain autoimmune conditions, experimental allergic encephalitis, can be induced by peripheral immunization of normal mice with peptides derived from normal brain proteins. So it is possible to induce immune responses against cells in the brain. Based on these findings, one of my essential questions and interests has been to explore

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Unlocking a new class of cancer targets: neoantigens from RNA splicing

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