A new computational tool, SpotNeoMet, developed at the Weizmann Institute, detects resistance mutations that recur in many patients and create neoantigens – a possible target for “precision” immunotherapy for broad patient groups
One of the greatest challenges in cancer medicine is dealing with the moment when the disease stops responding to treatment. In many metastatic tumors, drugs that are initially successful lose their effectiveness over time – as the cancer cells acquire mutations that allow them to survive and spread. New research from Prof.'s lab Jordana Samuels The Weizmann Institute of Science is proposing a new way to deal with the resistance of cancer tumors: exploiting the mutations that make them resistant to fight cancer.
Research Currently being published in the scientific journal CancerDiscovery Presents a new computational tool – SpotNeoMet – designed to systematically detect treatment-resistant mutations that recur in many patients and produce protein fragments unique to cancer cells called "neoantigens" – protein fragments that are not present in healthy cells and can serve as an identification marker for the immune system.
"The same mutations that allow a tumor to evade drugs may become, through precision immunotherapy, its weak point."
As a test case, the researchers, led by Dr. Nofar Gumpert and Dr. Shira Sagi from Prof. Samuels' lab, focused on metastatic prostate cancer, a disease in which most patients eventually develop resistance to existing treatments. In collaboration with Sheba and Hadassah Medical Centers in Israel and medical centers and universities in North America and Europe, the researchers identified three neoantigens that showed promising results in laboratory experiments and in a mouse cancer model, and may pave the way for the development of new immunotherapeutic treatments for resistant prostate cancer.
"The study demonstrates a broad principle that could change the way we think about drug-resistant cancer," says Prof. Samuels. "The same mutations that allow a tumor to evade drugs could, through precision immunotherapy, become its weak point. Unlike 'boutique' immunotherapies that are tailored to the individual patient, these treatments could be tailored to broad patient populations."
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Prostate cancer is one of the most common malignant tumors in men, with 1,466,680 new cases and 396,792 deaths in 2025.
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