Delineating the systemic landscape and novel drug targets ín cutaneous melanoma for improved clinical decision-making

Immune checkpoint inhibitors and targeted therapies have improved the outcome for metastatic cutaneous melanoma (CM) patients.

The histopathological and molecular characterization of metastatic CM and the understanding of the microenvironment are thus critical for more effective patient management and to design biologically driven clinical trials.

The overall purpose is to improve CM survival through by identifying and ultimately validating clinically impactful biomarkers and novel therapeutic targets to optimally inform clinical decision-making.

Our approach consists of multi-omics-based unsupervised and clinical- outcome- and pathological-outcome-based stratified analyses including machine learning of matched and curated tissue and plasma biospecimens from CM.

This will expand the concept of liquid biopsies to include not only DNA sequences, but also proteins sequences and opens up for the possibility to study fundamental biological processes also in brain metastatic disease. The impact of hyperinflammation on therapy responses will be investigated in in vitro/in vivo models.

This will give an unique insight of the interplay between the immune system, the individual tumors and metastatic niches. In addition, patient related outcome measures will be analyzed in parallell. We predict that these findnings will provide a rationale for a combinatorial immune therapy within a clinical trial.

In future this will improve and further advance  presicion medicine in advanced CM.