Sliding-attention transformer neural architecture for predicting T cell receptor–antigen–human leucocyte antigen binding

Neoantigens are promising targets for immunotherapy by eliciting immune response and removing cancer cells with high specificity, low toxicity and ease of personalization. However, identifying effective neoantigens remains difficult because of the complex interactions among T cell receptors, antigens and human leucocyte antigen sequences. In this study, we integrate important physical and biological priors with the Transformer model and propose the physics-inspired sliding transformer (PISTE). In PISTE, the conventional, data-driven attention mechanism is replaced with physics-driven dynamics that steers the positioning of amino acid residues along the gradient field of their interactions. This allows navigating the intricate landscape of biosequence interactions intelligently, leading to improved accuracy in T cell receptor–antigen–human leucocyte antigen binding prediction and robust generalization to rare sequences. Furthermore, PISTE effectively recovers residue-level contact relationships even in the absence of three-dimensional structure training data. We applied PISTE in a multitude of immunogenic tumour types to pinpoint neoantigens and discern neoantigen-reactive T cells. In a prospective study of prostate cancer, 75% of the patients elicited immune responses through PISTE-predicted neoantigens.