Uveal Melanoma Immunogenomic Score Shows Predictive Potential
Source: OncLive, April 2024
Investigators have developed a Uveal Melanoma Immunogenomic Score (UMIS) to predict which patients with metastatic uveal melanoma will respond to immunotherapy, according to findings published in Nature Communications.
“The dogma was that uveal melanoma is a ‘cold’ cancer, meaning that T cells can’t get into these tumors,” senior author Udai Kammula, MD, FACS, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Solid Tumor Cell Therapy Program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, in Pennsylvania, said in a press release.2 “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.”
Investigators examined 100 metastases surgically procured from 84 patients with uveal melanoma from tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) ACT clinical trials at the National Cancer Institute and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center between 2013 and 2022 (NCT01814046 and NCT03467516). They then developed a UMIS—the median score among the 100 metastases was 0.237 (range, 0.114-0.347)—which was then used as a cutoff to define high and low UMIS groups. Findings demonstrated that the most significantly enriched pathways were in the high UMIS group and involved T cell activation.1