RATIO: Rational Approach To Immuno-Oncology

The trial treatment will consist of a pretreatment 18 gauge core biopsy of locally advanced or metastatic cutaneous or subcutaneous lesions. The biopsies will be stabilized on site in RNAlater and shipped to ATAGC by courier at ambient temperature. RNA will be extracted using Trizol-chloroform method and purified using RNAEasy micro kit (Qiagen). RNA samples passing the quality control test (Agilent Bioanalyzer) will be labeled, hybridized to PrimeView Affymetrix microarrays and scanned according to the manufacturer's protocol. Resulting ".CEL" files will be used for the analysis of the global gene expression. Pathogenesis Based Transcript (PBT) sets that represent molecular signatures of inflammation will be assessed in core biopsies from melanoma patients. Each PBT set gets a "score" - a summarized expression of all members of a set. PBT scores allow an estimate of pre and post-treatment immunological activity in each tumor e.g. TCMR activity or macrophage burden. PBT scores will be correlated with clinical outcome to determine the utility of this technology as a prognostic and predictive biomarker. Finally a molecular classifier predicting the response to therapy will be built.