Interferon-gamma signature as prognostic and predictive marker in macroscopic stage III melanoma.

Background: A substantial proportion of patients with macroscopic stage III melanoma do not benefit sufficiently from adjuvant anti-PD-1 therapy, as they either recur despite therapy or would never have recurred. To better inform adjuvant treatment selection, we have performed translational analyses to identify prognostic and predictive biomarkers.

Patients And Methods: Two cohorts of patients with macroscopic stage III melanoma from an ongoing biobank study were included.

Tumor characteristics of dissociated response to immune checkpoint inhibition in advanced melanoma.

Introduction: Immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI) has improved patients' outcomes in advanced melanoma, often resulting in durable response. However, not all patients have durable responses and the patients with dissociated response are a valuable subgroup to identify mechanisms of ICI resistance.

Methods: Stage IV melanoma patients treated with ICI and dissociated response were retrospectively screened for available samples containing sufficient tumor at least at two time-points.

Association between pretreatment emotional distress and neoadjuvant immune checkpoint blockade response in melanoma.

Neoadjuvant immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) outperforms adjuvant ICB for treatment of stage IIIB-D melanoma, but potential biomarkers of response, such as interferon-gamma (IFNγ) signature and tumor mutational burden (TMB), are insufficient. Preclinical studies suggest that emotional distress (ED) can negatively affect antitumor immune responses via β-adrenergic or glucocorticoid signaling. We performed a post hoc analysis evaluating the association between pretreatment ED and clinical responses after neoadjuvant ICB treatment in patients with stage IIIB-D melanoma in the phase 2 PRADO trial ( NCT02977052 ).