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Outcomes and immune profile of type II diabetic patients on nivolumab/relat

Sabrina Bruno

Mentor Anthony Cillo, PhD and John Kirkwood, MD
Award Type Medical Student Award
Institution University of Pittsburgh
Donor Support In Honor of Chris Westdyk
When melanoma is not found early, it can get into your blood and lymphatic systems and spread to other parts of your body. When this happens, the melanoma is considered metastatic. Because the cancer has spread, surgical removal of tumors is not enough to stop the cancer from progressing, so additional medication is used to kill the cancer cells in the body. For many types of cancer, chemotherapy is used for this purpose. However, for melanoma specifically, a new medication type called immunotherapy has been improving survival compared to chemotherapy. The immunotherapy most commonly used for metastatic melanoma is called ipilimumab/nivolumab, but a new immunotherapy, nivolumab/relatlimab, has recently been approved also for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. Nivolumab/relatlimab works by targeting a particular protein on immune cells called LAG3. When nivolumab/relatlimab binds to LAG3, it activates the immune cell so that it can fight against the cancer. Current research suggests that patients with type II diabetes may have less LAG3 proteins on their immune cells and therefore less places for the nivolumab/relatlimab drug to bind to. Therefore, we hypothesize that nivolumab/relatlimab does not work as well in this population and ipilimumab/nivolumab will work better in comparison for this particular group. In order to test this hypothesis we will gather information from the chart such as treatment start, duration, any recurrences, as well as other variables to fully explore and uncover any differences in response rates between the two treatment groups. We will also collect blood samples from metastatic melanoma patients treated with ipilimumab/nivolumab and nivolumab/relatlimab to look at and compare the immune cells in each group both before and during treatment.