The team worked together to develop supervised and unsupervised AI to reveal the molecular characteristics of peptide antigens , small pieces of protein molecules that immune cells use to recognise threats . Project members came from diverse groups led by Cleveland Clinic ’ s Timothy Chan , M . D ., PhD , as well as IBM ’ s Jeff Weber , PhD , Senior Research Scientist , and Wendy Cornell , PhD , Manager and Strategy Lead for Healthcare and Life Sciences Accelerated Discovery .

“ In the past , all our data on cancer antigen targets came from trial and error ,” said Dr Chan , Chair of Cleveland Clinic ’ s Centre for Immunotherapy and Precision Immuno- Oncology and Sheikha Fatima Bint Mubarak Endowed Chair in Immunotherapy and Precision Immuno-Oncology . “ Partnering with IBM allows us to push the boundaries of AI and health sciences research to change the way we develop and evaluate targets for cancer therapy .”

For decades , scientists have been researching how to better identify antigens and use them to attack cancer cells or cells infected with viruses . This task has proved challenging because antigen peptides interact with immune cells based on specific features on the surface of the cells , a process which is still not well understood . researchers could hone in on what processes are critical to target with immunotherapy treatments such as vaccines and engineered immune cells .

Researchers can incorporate these insights into other AI models moving forward to identify more effective immunotherapy targets .

“ These discoveries are an example of what makes this partnership successful – combining IBM ’ s cutting-edge computational resources with Cleveland Clinic ’ s medical expertise ,” Dr Weber said . “ These findings resulted from a key collaboration between everyone from a world-class expert in cancer immunotherapy to our physics-based simulation and AI experts . Collaboration when combined with innovation has terrific potential .”

Cleveland Clinic and IBM launched their Discovery Accelerator partnership in 2021 , which is focused on advancing the pace of biomedical research through the use of high-performance computing , Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing . The landmark partnership brings together Cleveland Clinic ’ s world-renowned expertise in healthcare and life sciences , with IBM ’ s next-generation technologies to make scientific discovery faster . �

Research has been limited by the sheer number of variables that affect how immune systems recognise these targets . Identifying these variables is difficult and time-intensive with regular computing , so current models are limited and at times inaccurate .

Published in Briefings in Bioinformatics , the study found that AI models that account for changes in molecular shape over time can accurately depict how immune systems recognise a target antigen . Through these models ,

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