Hidden Targets in Cancer Immunotherapy: The Potential of “Dark Matter” Neoantigens

Abstract

The development of cancer immunotherapies has transformed cancer treatment paradigms, yet durable and tumour-specific responses remain elusive for many patients. Neoantigens, immunogenic peptides arising from tumour-specific genomic alterations, have emerged as promising cancer vaccine targets. Early-phase clinical trials using different vaccine platforms, including mRNA, peptide, DNA, and viral vector-based personalised cancer vaccines, have demonstrated the feasibility of targeting neoantigens, with early signals of prolonged survival in some patients. Most current vaccine strategies focus on canonical neoantigens, typically derived from exonic single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) and small insertions/deletions (INDELs), yet this represents only a fraction of the potential neoantigen repertoire. Evidence now shows that non-canonical neoantigens, arising mostly from alternative splicing, intron retention, translation of non-coding RNAs, gene fusions, and retroelement activation, broaden the antigenic landscape, with the potential for increasing tumour specificity and immunogenicity. In this review, we explore the biology of non-canonical neoantigens, the technological advances that now enable their systematic detection, and their potential to inform next-generation personalised cancer vaccines.