Metastatic uveal melanoma is a poor-prognosis disease. To date, remarkable advantages of a systemic therapy have not been reported and a standard treatment has not been established. Although uveal melanoma was not included in ICI controlled clinical trials, this neoplasm is commonly treated with immunotherapy as a cutaneous melanoma, despite the different clinical and biological features with poor results. There is in fact an absolute need to characterize the immune status of these patients in order to identify predictive and prognostic biomarkers of response/efficacy to immunotherapy treatment. In addition to membrane bound¿immune checkpoint inhibitors, soluble checkpoints can diffuse in the serum of patients and much evidence has demonstrated that these soluble checkpoints are involved in positive or negative immune regulation and that changes in their plasma levels affect the development, prognosis and treatment of cancer
In this project we will investigate the circulating immune profile of uveal melanoma patients in order to evaluate their immunological status and in particular the potential role of soluble immune checkpoint molecules in predicting the efficacy of anti PD-1 therapy.
