Project description:Immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment, yet most patients do not respond. Here, we investigated mechanisms of response by deeply profiling the proteome of clinical samples from advanced stage melanoma patients undergoing either tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL)-based or anti-PD1 immunotherapy. Using high-resolution mass spectrometry, we quantified over 10,300 proteins with high accuracy. Statistical analyses revealed higher oxidative phosphorylation and lipid metabolism in responders in both treatments, and identified proteomic signatures for response. Aiming to elucidate the effects of the metabolic state on the immune response, we examined melanoma cells upon metabolic perturbations or Crisp-Cas9 knockouts. These experiments indicated lipid metabolism as a regulatory mechanism that increases melanoma immunogenicity by elevating antigen presentation, thereby affecting the sensitivity to T-cell mediated killing both in-vitro and in-vivo. Altogether, our proteomic analyses revealed novel association between the melanoma metabolic state and the response to immunotherapy, which can be the basis for future improvement of therapeutic response.
Project description:RATIONALE: Immunotherapy uses different ways to stimulate the immune system and stop cancer cells from growing. Immunotherapy biological extracts may be useful as adjuvant therapy in treating patients who have had surgery for breast cancer, colon cancer, or melanoma.
PURPOSE: Phase III trial to study the effectiveness of Corynebacterium granulosum extract as maintenance immunotherapy following surgery in treating patients with breast cancer, colon cancer, or melanoma.
Project description:Despite the successful application of immunotherapy, both innate and acquired resistance are typical in melanoma. Ferroptosis induction appears to be a potential strategy to enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapy. However, the relationship between the status of ferroptosis and the effectiveness of immunotherapy, as well as viable strategies to augment ferroptosis, remain unclear. In this study, through large-scale drug screening of cardiovascular drugs, we identified propafenone, an anti-arrhythmia medication, as capable of synergizing with ferroptosis inducers in melanoma. Furthermore, we observed that propafenone, in combination with RSL3, collaboratively induces mitochondrial-associated ferroptosis. Mechanistically, propafenone transcriptionally upregulates mitochondrial HMOX1 via activation of the JNK/JUN signaling pathway under RSL3 treatment, leading to overloaded ferrous iron and ROS within the mitochondria. In xenograft models, the combination of propafenone with ferroptosis induction led to nearly complete tumor regression. Consistently, propafenone enhances immunotherapy-induced antitumor immunity and tumoral ferroptosis in tumor-bearing mice. Significantly, patients exhibiting high levels of ferroptosis/JUN/HMOX1 exhibited improved efficacy of immunotherapy and prolonged progression-free survival. These findings suggest that propafenone holds promise as a candidate drug for enhancing the efficacy of immunotherapy and other ferroptosis-targeted therapies in the treatment of melanoma.
Project description:Immune checkpoint inhibitors are used to restore or augment antitumor immune response and show great promise in treatment of melanoma and other types of cancers. However, only a relatively small percentage of patients are fully responsive to immune checkpoint inhibition, mostly due to tumor heterogeneity and primary resistance to therapy. Both of these features are largely driven by accumulation of patient-specific mutations, pointing to the need for personalized approaches in diagnostics and immunotherapy. Proteogenomics integrates patient-specific genomic and proteomic data to study cancer development and resistance mechanisms, as well as tumor heterogeneity in individual patients. Here, we use a proteogenomic approach to characterize the mutational landscape of samples derived from four clinical melanoma patients at the genomic, proteomic and phosphoproteomic level. Integration of datasets enabled identification and quantification of an extensive number of sample-specific amino acid variants, among them many were not previously reported in melanoma. We detected a disproportional number of alternate peptides between treated and untreated (naïve) samples with a high potential to influence signal transduction. This is one of the first proteogenomic study designed to study the mutational landscape of patient-derived melanoma tissue samples in response to immunotherapy.
Project description:To investigate the contribution of intratumor microbiome in cancer immunotherapy, we applied microbiome Eudoraea in combination with anti-PD-1 antibody in mouse model of B16F10 melanoma. We then performed gene expression profiling analysis using data obtained from RNA-seq of 4 different treatments .