Technology
DarkNeo
DarkNeo is our AI system for discovering cryptic antigens — peptides arising from the dark proteome, the vast space of non-canonical translation that conventional gene annotation leaves unmapped. Because tumors translate these regions while normal cells largely do not, cryptic antigens are highly tumor-specific, yet mass spectrometry captures only a fraction of them. DarkNeo predicts them instead, opening a source of targets that neither mutation sequencing nor proteomics can reach.
- Trained to predict sample-specific non-canonical translation directly from RNA-seq, DarkNeo identifies cryptic peptides that mass spectrometry–based approaches systematically miss.
- DarkNeo candidates are screened using DeepNeo and LexiNeo across population-level MHC alleles to find antigens presented and recognized in many patients, not just one.
- Because such antigens are shared rather than patient-private, they enable off-the-shelf cancer vaccines — manufactured in advance, without the cost and lead time of individualized production.
