Glossary · concept
HLA typing
Determining a patient's specific HLA alleles — a required first step, since HLA dictates which neoantigens can be presented.
Because HLA genes vary so much between people, every personalized vaccine pipeline must first determine the patient's HLA type, usually from sequencing data. The predicted neoantigens are only meaningful relative to that patient's particular HLA alleles.
Accurate HLA typing — especially for rare alleles — is itself a computational problem, and errors propagate directly into which neoantigens get selected.