Evidence map›Paper›PMID 41923632›Full record

ArticleCell reports methods2026

A lightweight TcrLM model predicts T cell receptor and epitope binding specificity.

Chenpeng Yu, Xing Fang, Shiye Tian, Judong Luo, Hui Liu

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Cell reports methods, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Review
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4 · The record

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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

Chenpeng YuCollege of Computer and Information Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211800, China.
Xing FangCollege of Computer and Information Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211800, China.
Shiye TianCollege of Computer and Information Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211800, China.
Judong LuoDepartment of Radiotherapy, Tongji Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. Electronic address: judongluo@tongji.edu.cn.
Hui LiuCollege of Computer and Information Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211800, China. Electronic address: hliu@njtech.edu.cn.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Immune responses depend on specific interactions between T cell receptors (TCRs) and peptides presented by antigen-presenting cells (APCs). The vast diversity of the TCR repertoire makes accurate prediction of TCR-antigen binding specificity highly challenging. Here, we present a lightweight, masked language model, tcrLM, to address this problem. We pretrain tcrLM on a large-scale TCR CDR3 sequence dataset and use the pretrained encoder to extract informative features for pTCR binding prediction. tcrLM achieves competitive performance on hold-out and external test sets and shows comparatively robust zero-shot generalization relative to several baselines on a large, unseen-COVID-19 peptide set. The model effectively captures biochemical properties and positional preferences of amino acids within TCR sequences. In an exploratory melanoma cohort, the predicted TCR-neoantigen binding scores correlate with immunotherapy response and clinical outcomes. These results highlight the potential of tcrLM for advancing immunotherapy and personalized medicine.

Indexed as

EpitopesReceptors, Antigen, T-CellComplementarity Determining RegionsHumansImmunoinformaticsMelanomaPeptidesProtein BindingSARS-CoV-2Complementarity Determining RegionsEpitopesPeptidesReceptors, Antigen, T-CellCP: computational biologyCP: immunologylarge language modelpeptide-TCR bindingT cell receptorTransformertumor neoantigenvirtual adversarial training

Identifiers

PMID41923632
PMCPMC13198001

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.