Abstract Immune therapies including checkpoint blockade and adoptive T cell transfer show great promise for the treatment of melanoma, with long-term effects in some patients. However, not all patients respond to current immune therapies and are in need of other treatment strategies. For example, around half of the patients with metastatic malignant melanoma will not be cured with available therapies today. For metastatic uveal melanoma (a rare melanoma of the eye) available immune therapies have less effect, and there is currently no approved therapy for these patients. Our objective is to find novel immune therapies with the potential to treat immune-therapy resistant melanoma, with the use of chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR-T). So far, no CAR-T therapy is approved for use in solid tumors. We have previously developed a humanized mouse model, where tumor cells and T cells from the same patient are grafted in IL-2 transgenic NOD/SCID IL2 receptor gamma knockout (NOG) mice, and found that responses in the mouse model correlated to responses in the corresponding patients in a clinical trial of adoptive T cell transfer (Jespersen et al, Nature Communications, 2017). In order to test the potential for CAR-T therapy in immune-therapy resistant melanoma in this mouse model, we used TCGA to determine the expression in melanoma biopsies of targets for commercially available CAR-T cells. Interestingly, we were able to use this model to treat immune-therapy resistant malignant melanoma and uveal melanoma patient-derived xenografts with human CAR-T cells and obtain curative responses, but only in IL-2 transgenic mice and not in regular NOG mice. These findings prove potential for the use of CAR-T cell therapy in immune-therapy resistant melanoma, and indicate the utility of this mouse model in the translation of CAR-T therapies. We are currently working on the development of CAR-T cells derived from patient-specific T cells. Citation Format: Elin Forsberg, Mattias Lindberg, Henrik Jespersen, Samuel Alsén, Roger Olofsson Bagge, Marco Donia, Inge Marie Svane, Ola Nilsson, Lars Ny, Lisa Nilsson, Jonas Nilsson. CAR-T cells can eradicate human uveal melanoma and immune-therapy resistant malignant melanoma in IL-2 transgenic NOD/SCID IL2 receptor gamma knockout mice [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 3185.
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