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Susanna Fletcher Greer: New Screening Tool Unlocks Hidden Cancer Clues

Susanna Fletcher Greer/LinkedIn

Aug 7, 2025, 16:42

Susanna Fletcher Greer: New Screening Tool Unlocks Hidden Cancer Clues

Susanna Fletcher Greer, Chief Scientific Officer at the V Foundation, shared on LinkedIn:

“I am still feeling so inspired after this weekend’s the V Foundation Wine Celebration – $12.3M raised to fund game-changing cancer research! That kind of momentum matters, because the research we’re supporting is tackling some of the biggest and most complex questions in cancer.

This week’s cool paper highlights one of those big questions:

How can we find the tiny pieces of cancer that the immune system will actually see, and attack?

These pieces act like distress signals. But for our immune system to respond, they need to be displayed on the outside of a cell. That’s the job of a system in our bodies called HLA. Think of HLA as a set of ‘displays’ – they hold up the pieces as signs for the immune system to read.

Here’s the twist: each person has a slightly different set of HLA types, and they don’t all display the same signs. In fact, the HLA region is one of the most variable parts of the entire human genome, with thousands of versions across the human population. This makes it incredibly hard for researchers to predict which signs will get noticed, and by which immune cells.

That’s where immune system T cells come in. These are the body’s security guards, constantly patrolling for signs of cancer. But T cells can only respond to cancer if the “sign” on the cancer cell is properly displayed on a matching HLA “display.”

So how do we figure out which cancer ‘signs’ get posted, and which ones T cells will respond to?

That’s been one of the toughest problems in immunotherapy.

Enter ESCAPE-seq, a new, high-speed screening tool developed by the V Foundation grantee Dr. Bingfei Yu at University of Southern California. The ESCAPE-seq tool can test over 75,000 combinations of cancer pieces and HLA types at ONCE. That’s like going from searching one billboard at a time to scanning a whole interstate’s worth of them in an instant!

Susanna Fletcher Greer

With ESCAPE-seq, researchers can:

Quickly identify which cancer signals are most likely to be seen by the immune system,
Prioritize the best candidates for future cancer vaccines or T cell therapies,
Build a much clearer picture of how cancer becomes visible, or stays hidden, from the immune system.

This is the kind of research that makes the impossible feel within reach! It’s a critical step toward building the treatments of tomorrow.

The next step? Testing in the lab, and then in patients, to see if they can safely and effectively train the immune system to fight cancer.

That’s how research becomes impact.

Find the Yu lab at Bingfei Yu – Keck School of Medicine of USC and read this incredible paper at Massively parallel immunopeptidome by DNA sequencing provides insights into cancer antigen presentation | Nature Genetics.”

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