New UK startup pursues off-the-shelf CAR-T, cancer vaccines through 'dark antigens'
Scientists unfurling the human genome at the turn of the century came across many surprises but perhaps nothing as shocking as the percentage of the genome that didn’t appear to code for anything. Around 2% wrote proteins and the rest appeared to be “junk,” “dark,” or, as the New York Times then put it, “the apparent product of a typing pool of drunken baboons. “
Armed with the supposition baboons hadn’t created human DNA, many scientists have the spent the prevailing two decades figuring out what the so-called junk DNA is for or how it got there. One startup out of the UK is now bypassing part of that question and attempting to leverage segments of “dark” DNA for cancer vaccines and immunotherapies.
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