Last year we awarded two research grants at The University of Manchester and The University of Birmingham. We are delighted to report that the grants were put to work immediately and progress is being made.
At Birmingham, the aim of the project is to understand the influence of cytomegalovirus on the immune system inside the melanoma tumour. Dr Matthew Pugh gave us a fascinating update.
“We have conducted x6000-plex spatial profiling comparing the melanoma tumour microenvironment in CMV-positive and CMV-negative patients. We are already seeing differences in the immune cells inside the melanoma tumour, between CMV-positive and CMV-negative patients. Some populations of T-cells are enriched in melanoma tumours from CMV-positive patients, which might explain why these patients respond differently to immune therapy”.
At Manchester Dr Rebecca (Becki) Lee’s project is understanding how targeted therapy modulates the liver microenvironment in Melanoma liver metastasis. Becki got in touch to tell us they had performed some preliminary experiments to examine the immune changes and are expecting some better results in the next 3 months. They are currently optimising their human CyTOF panels, which allow high-dimensional immune profiling in a single, streamlined experiment.
“The governance is almost there to analyse samples for proteins- we have just changed the assay slightly to one that we can get more information from” reports Becki.
