Journal of Blood Disorders & Transfusion

Stratifying patients for immune checkpoint blockade cancer therapies

4^th International Conference on Blood Malignancies & Treatment

April 18-19, 2016 Dubai, UAE

Jean Jacques Fournie

Institut Universitaire du Cancer de Toulouse-Oncopole, France

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Blood Disord Transfus

Abstract:

Non-Hodgkin�??s B-cell lymphomas (B-NHL) are aggressive lymphoid malignancies which develop in patients due to oncogenic activation, chemo-resistance and immune evasion. Tumor biopsies show that B-NHL frequently deploys several immune escape strategies, a problem for the development of checkpoint blockade immunotherapies in these diseases. In particular, there are currently no means to identify those B-NHL patients most likely to respond to the new therapeutic antibodies. Meta-analysis of large series of microarrays from B-NHL biopsies is necessary to assess their immuno-edition, but material (single datasets) and methods to do this are currently lacking. This talk will present a new datamining strategy to do so, and their results in large cohorts of ~1500 patients with B-NHL. This approach was validated by producing scores fully matched to phenotypic hallmarks of B-NHL. Then, immune escape in patients was investigated by this method, and revealed a significant immune escape in most samples of DLBCL and FL, but fewer in MCL and MZL. Both gene expression patterns and overall survival data evidence four stages of cancer immuno-editing in B-NHL: �?� Non-immunogenic tumors (stage 1) �?� Immunogenic tumors without immune escape (stage 2) �?� Immunogenic tumors with immunoescape (stage 3) �?� Fully immunoedited tumors (stage 4) Scores characterizing immunoescape stages 3 and 4 (76% of FL and DLBCL samples in the dataset) identify those B-NHL patients relevant for immune checkpoint blockade therapeutics. Beyond, the consequences of these findings will be discussed in the more general context of molecular profilings for cancer treatment.

Biography :

Jean Jacques Fournié completed his PhD (Biochemistry and Immunology) from Toulouse University and a Post-doctoral stay at the Clinical Immunology Research Center of University of Sydney, Australia. He is the Founding Director of Cancer Research Center of Toulouse, an international cancer research laboratory from INSERM, University of Toulouse 3 and CNRS, and leads the research team ‘Innovating Therapeutics Strategies in Lymphomas’ of Laboratoire d’Excellence Toulouse Cancer at Institut Universitaire du Cancer of Toulouse-Oncopole, France. He published more than 150 papers in reputed journals, produced 21 patents and co-founded the Innate Pharma Company (www.innate-pharma.com).

Email: jean-jacques.fournie@inserm.fr