Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine
Melanoma is an aggressive type of skin cancer, and even after successful surgery and modern therapies, a considerable number of patients experience disease recurrence. For these patients, it is often difficult to predict which treatment options will be effective before disease progression. To address this gap, researchers from Fraunhofer ITEM investigated whether cancer cells that have already spread to lymph nodes – so-called micrometastatic or disseminated cancer cells – can be used to create patient-specific models for personalized drug testing.
The team successfully generated both in vitro and in vivo models that closely reflected the individual patient’s tumor biology and were available before patient death and, in 82% of cases, before relapse. Using these models, more than 300 cancer drugs were tested to identify therapies that showed anti-tumor activity, as well as potential second-line treatments in models resistant to BRAF or MEK inhibitors. In addition, the researchers explored how patient immune cells responded to selected treatments, providing further insight into the effectiveness of immunotherapies. Importantly, the timely generation of models and functional drug screening could have identified potential personalized therapies for most patients before the onset of distant metastases.
Overall, these findings highlight a promising strategy to improve the selection of treatment options for high-risk melanoma patients through individual model generation and functional drug screening.
