Project: Quantifying systemic immunosuppression to personalize cancer therapy

Acronym	SERPENTINE (Reference Number: ERAPERMED2019-320)
Duration	01/04/2020 - 31/03/2023
Project Topic	Most cancer therapies are reported to rely on the contribution of host immunity for exerting clinical benefit. Efficacy is usually accompanied by the increase of T cell tumor infiltrate, while resistance is featured by the accrual of myeloid immunosuppressive cells (MDSC). Particularly, the frequency of MDSC in blood has been associated by many groups, including ours, to poor prognosis and resistance to treatment in several malignancies. Nonetheless, no effort to translate this key concept into clinical practice for stratifying cancer patients and possibly increasing their curability by personalizing treatment strategy, has been performed so far. The Serpentine Project is committed to achieve this goal in a concerted fashion by exploiting the clinical and scientific expertise of the Consortium members, to provide a new, strong, affordable and easy prognostic/predictive biomarker based on quantifying systemic immunosuppression. A prospective multicentric study enrolling patients with representative neoplasms treated with standard therapy, will be performed and blood samples collected at baseline and during treatment for MDSC-related analyses. A Myeloid Index Score (MIS), obtained by 4-color cytometry recently developed within the Consortium, will be assessed and recorded in a shared in-cloud database together with clinical data and additional information collected throughout the study. Baseline MIS will be correlated with PFS and OS, to define a risk of therapeutic resistance. In parallel, blood MDSC and plasma will be studied in depth by genomic, and transcriptional profiling to implement MIS and identify novel MDSC-targeting strategies to be tested on an MDSC-in vitro model platform. The Serpentine is designed to provide the first tool for assessing systemic myeloid-mediated immune suppression in cancer patients and discovering new drug modulating strategies, to help tailoring treatments and improving cancer curability in a real life setting.
Network	ERA PerMed
Call	2nd Joint Transnational Call for Proposals (2019)

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori	Coordinator	Italy
2	German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)	Partner	Germany
3	Institut du Cancer de Montpellier, ICM	Partner	France
4	Oslo University Hospital (OUH)	Partner	Norway
5	ASST Papa Giovanni XXIII	Partner	Italy
6	Faculty of Science, Tanta University	Partner	Egypt