This year‘s Swiss Bridge Award goes to a research group from Spain and a research group from Switzerland.

With the 250,000 Swiss Francs awarded to each, the researchers aim to investigate interactions between cancer cells and the immune system.

The 2018 Swiss Bridge Foundation’s Award has been presented to researchers under the age of 45 years old who are pursuing the investigation of the complex interactions between a patients immune system and cancer, how the disease suppresses and redirects the patients' defences, and how to unlock their power to fight tumours.

In a two-step evaluation process, a eleven-member jury selected two projects.

Both project leaders, Rodrigo de Almeida Toledo of Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), Spain, and Ping-Chih Ho, from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, will receive 250 000 Swiss francs each for the implementation of their research projects.

IMMUNOMICS: Co-evolutionary dynamics landscape of neoplastic cells and T-cells interactions during cancer immunotherapy

Checkpoint inhibitor therapies (CIT) have changed the treatment landscape in many cancer types and showed that CIT harbours the capacity to cure cancers even when presented in advanced, metastatic stages.

Despite the unprecedented long-lasting results seen in a subset of patients, most of the patients will actually not benefit, so predictive biomarkers of response are clearly needed.

In their winning project, the VHIO team proposed a comprehensive genomics platform to portray the coevolutionary dynamics landscape of cancers cells and T-cells interactions of patients enrolled in the Resistance to Immunoncology clinical platform of the Early Clinical Drug Development Unit at Vall d´Hebron hospital.

Dr Toledo writes "We envision that by expanding the current understanding of the genomic-driven evolutionary dynamics of cancer cells and the patient´s immune system occurring in the context of CIT, our study will identify predicting biomarkers as well as have direct implications in CIT drug development and on the design of novel clinical trials capable to explore such dynamics as an approach to elicit an immune response and increase response in a larger population of cancer patients treated with CIT."

Investigating if UCP2 expression in melanoma cells predicts therapeutic outcomes of checkpoint blockade

Recent findings suggest that the tumor microenvironment imposes environmental restrictions to prevent T cell infiltration, which has been referred to as “cold” tumor, and impair the anti-tumor effector functions of infiltrating T cells.

The lack of T cell infiltration in tumors represents the major form of primary resistance to cancer immunotherapies.

Greater investigation into the identification of immunostimulatory trigger(s) to “heat up” T cell infiltration in cold tumors is required to develop effective cancer immunotherapies.

To address this critical but unsolved issues, The team from the University of Lausanne investigated whether there are any markers associated with stronger immune responses by mining melanoma patient samples in the The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, finding that the mRNA expression levels of mitochondrial uncoupling protein 2 (UCP2) strongly associate with elevated anti-tumour immunity.

Dr Ho writes "Our preliminary data reveal that overexpression of UCP2 in melanoma cells effectively stimulates recruitment of CD8 T cells and induces tumour regression. Moreover, our results reveal that elevated UCP2 expression associates with stronger T cell infiltration signature in multiple types of tumours. Therefore, we hypothesize that UCP2 expression levels in melanoma cells could be a biomarker to indicate the immune state of the tumour microenvironment and therapeutic outcomes of checkpoint blockade therapies. The premise of the work proposed herein is to a better elucidate whether UCP2 expression in melanoma cells and its associated alterations in circulation could predict anti-tumour responses upon checkpoint blockade treatment in patients. This work could be pivotal in providing prognostic indicators for cancer immunotherapies."

Source: Swiss Bridge