Abstract 1439 Mass spectrometry based immunopeptidomics as a tool for understanding antigen presentation

Immunotherapies have emerged to treat diseases by selectively modulating a patient's immune response. Although the roles of T cells in adaptive immunity have been well studied, it remains difficult to select T cell targets for immunotherapeutic strategies. As such, methods like mass spectrometry based immunopeptidomics that enable the direct characterization of human leukocyte antigen class I (HLA-I) and class II (HLA-II) peptides are critical for the development of T cell targeting immunotherapies. By leveraging the advances in mass spectrometry technology and sample preparation, we have been able to drastically lower the input requirements for immunopeptidomics to as few as 1 million cells and increase our throughput to allow for the characterization of larger patient cohorts. Overall, improvements to immunopeptidomic methods will facilitate a deeper understanding of the interplay between disease pathologies and the presentation of HLA peptides, which will aid in the development of future immunotherapies.