Specific Challenge:
To improve therapy, the understanding of the tumour microenvironment needs to evolve. Firstly, the understanding of tumour/host interaction on the cellular and molecular level in the absence of therapeutic intervention needs to improve. Both individual tumours and individual hosts are heterogeneous with respect to the quality and degree of immunity. Understanding the cellular and molecular nature of the tumour microenvironment will (i) help us characterise the ability of a patient’s immune system to mount an anti-tumour attack and (ii) provide ideas which pharmacological interventions may support or activate the immune cells to attack the tumour cells.
Secondly and in close alignment with the previous paragraph, one needs to understand how current therapeutic approaches affect the host/tumour interaction to have a baseline from which to improve the current therapeutic paradigm. Such data could be used to further improve currently available treatments or to develop new potential therapeutic strategies.
The proposed topic, for the first time, will assemble a consortium to generate a data set sufficient to gain a meaningful view of the tumour micro-environment. The generation of such a data set is the core activity of this IMI2 JU topic while the future purposes (improvement of the currently available treatments and development of potential therapeutic strategies) go beyond the frame of this topic.
Scope:
The ultimate aim and core activity is to create a database containing integrated cellular and molecular data from the tumour microenvironment of patients treated with both targeted and non-targeted therapy, in particular immunotherapy, as well as key information from patient history and clinical progression.
Core activity (broad profiling):
development of a fully integrated data set of defined immune cell subsets (deliverables (1) and (2)) in samples from patients from specific cancer indications treated with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy and, in particular, targeted immune checkpoint therapy and correlation to the oncogenomic profile of the tumour.
Supplemental activities:
Expected Impact:
A comprehensive database, profiling immune cells in the tumour microenvironment (TME) of patients that are responsive to immune checkpoint blockade versus those that are not, is generally lacking at the present time and therefore the creation of such a database is the ultimate aim of this IMI2 JU topic. A searchable database, with integrated tumour genomic information along with matched immune profiles and (immune) therapy outcome, will enable users to identify biological networks involved in, and develop biomarkers to predict response to, immunotherapy. Maximum impact would be achieved by continued integration of clinical outcome data received after the end of the consortium. This IMI2 JU topic is expected to be the basis for future significant impacts but these will go beyond the scope and timeframe of the IMI2 JU topic: