New insights could unlock immunotherapy for rare, deadly eye cancer
Source: Eurek Alert!, April 2024
New research from the University of Pittsburgh explains why metastatic uveal melanoma is resistant to conventional immunotherapies and how adoptive therapy, which involves growing a patient’s T cells outside the body before reinfusing them, can successfully treat this rare and aggressive cancer.
In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the Pitt researchers also explain how they developed a new clinical tool that predicts which patients will respond to adoptive therapy. The work, supported by UPMC Enterprises, is helping improve personalized therapies and avoid futile treatments for metastatic uveal melanoma.
“The dogma was that uveal melanoma is a ‘cold’ cancer, meaning that T cells can’t get into these tumors,” said senior author Udai Kammula, M.D., associate professor of surgery at Pitt and director of the Solid Tumor Cell Therapy Program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. “We show that T cells are in fact infiltrating metastases and they’re getting activated, but they’re just sitting there in a dormant state because something in the tumor is suppressing them. Adoptive therapy allows us to rescue these cells from the suppressive tumor microenvironment and successfully treat some patients.”