Abstract

Treatment for metastatic melanoma includes targeted and/or immuno-therapy. Although many patients respond, only a subset have complete response. As late stage patients often have multiple tumours in difficult access sites, non-invasive techniques are necessary for the development of predictive/prognostic biomarkers. PET/CT scans from 52 stage III/IV melanoma patients were assessed and CT image parameters were evaluated as prognostic biomarkers. Analysis indicated patients with high standard deviation or high mean of positive pixels (MPP) had worse progression-free survival (p=0.00047 and p=0.0014, respectively) and worse overall survival (p=0.0223 and p=0.0465, respectively). Whole-exome sequencing showed high MPP was associated with BRAF mutation status (p=0.0389). RNA-sequencing indicated patients with immune 'cold' signatures had worse survival, which was associated with CT biomarker, MPP4 (p=0.0284). Multiplex immunofluorescence confirmed a correlation between CD8 expression and image biomarkers (p=0.0028). Implications: CT parameters have the potential to be cost-effective biomarkers of survival in melanoma, and reflect the tumour immune-microenvironment.

Authors	Aoude, Lauren G; Wong, Bernadette; Bonazzi, Vanessa F; Brosda, Sandra; Walters, Shaun B; Koufariotis, Lambros T; Naeini, Marjan M; Pearson, John V; Oey, Harald; Patel, Kalpana; Bradford, Julia J; Bloxham, Conor J; Atkinson, Victoria; Law, Phillip; Strutton, Geoffrey; Bayley, Gerard; Yang, Samuel; Smithers, B Mark; Waddell, Nicola; Miles, Kenneth; Barbour, Andrew P
Journal	Molecular cancer research : MCR
Pages	950-956
Volume	19
Date	1/01/2021
Grant ID
Funding Body
URL	http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=10.1158/1541-7786.MCR-20-1038