A new study from Prof. Yardena Samuels’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science proposes a new way to confront cancer resistance: harnessing the very mutations that make tumors resistant in order to fight the cancer.

The study, published in Cancer Discovery, presents a new computational tool, SpotNeoMet, that systematically identifies therapy-resistance mutations common to many patients.

These mutations lead to the production of protein fragments known as neo-antigens, which are unique to cancer cells and absent from healthy cells, allowing them to serve as recognition signals for the immune system.