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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