Achilles Therapeutics’ New Immunogenicity Prediction Application of its AI-Powered PELEUS Platform Uniquely Identifies the Most Potent T Cell Antigens

– New AI module delivers a “Target-to-T cell” approach for revolutionizing the identification and prioritization of targets for personalized antigen approaches –

Achilles Therapeutics plc, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing AI-powered precision T cell therapies targeting clonal neoantigens to treat solid tumors, announced that the Company’s new AI application, trained with proprietary real-world data, outperformed current AI and non-AI state-of-the-art methods for neoantigen immunogenicity prediction in a recent analysis, enabling the identification of the most potent clonal neoantigens for personalized cancer therapies. Further details of this new capability of the Company’s AI-powered PELEUS™ bioinformatics platform are expected to be presented at an upcoming scientific meeting.

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Of the large numbers of neoantigens that are initially identified in a patient’s tumor, only a fraction will yield T cell responses that can deliver clinical benefit. Achilles has developed an AI tool to enable the prospective identification of the most potent neoantigens. The new PELEUS™ neoantigen immunogenicity ranking module was trained and validated with data from over 10,000 neoantigens from in-silico identification through expansion and characterization of actual T cell clones. With this new tool, the PELEUS™ platform can accurately predict which neoantigens are most likely to generate a potent T cell response, supporting the potential implementation of the platform into the Company’s ongoing TIL-based clinical programs in advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and melanoma, and into other modalities including clonal neoantigen cancer vaccines.

“We believe our ‘Target-to-T Cell’ approach will be fundamental to unlocking the potential of precision therapies from our own T cell approach with TIL-based clonal neoantigen-reactive T cells (cNeT) to personalized neoantigen approaches. We believe the key to accurate predictions, and thus the best neoantigens and related products, is training your AI system on the highest quality data sets,” said Dr Sergio Quezada, Chief Scientific Officer of Achilles Therapeutics. “The superiority of our patent-protected PELEUS™ platform in predicting clinically relevant clonal neoantigens with this new AI module has transformational potential, as a focus on the most potent antigens should drive long term durable responses with a wide range of precision treatment modalities.”

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The analysis conducted by the Bioinformatics & Data Science Team at Achilles demonstrated that the PELEUS™ platform delivered significantly improved ranking performance when compared to currently used state-of-the-art methods as measured by “Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve” (ROC AUC). ROC AUC evaluates the performance of a machine learning model to predict neoantigens that are confirmed in vivo. The PELEUS™ AI immunogenicity ranking tool was developed and trained using proprietary real-world data from patient material from Achilles’ Material Acquisition Program (MAP), the ongoing CHIRON trial in patients with advanced NSCLC, and the THETIS trial in patients with recurrent or metastatic melanoma. Current AI methods are trained on publicly available data from sources such as the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB), a freely available resource funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Disease (NIAID).

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