Workshops - Working Groups

The YSPORE recently organized a workshop in which all five existing SPOREs in Skin cancer participated (Harvard, Wistar/UPenn, MD Anderson, Pittsburgh and Yale). The investigators met on July 11-12, 2008 at Quinnipiac Club in New Haven. The purpose was to discuss a broad variety of topics including: collection, management, and analysis of the vast data generated from different melanoma/melanocyte “omics” platforms; development of MelaGRID; integration of “omics” from published and unpublished data in a more investigator-friendly manner; adapting local programs to fit with a common, investigator friendly portals such as caTISSUE and caBIG; how to improve the AJCC staging; how to integrate new markers and data annotations; the need for prognostic markers; types of markers that should be incorporated into the AJCC to improve patient selection for specific therapy; the need for genetic signature of lesions that may dictate the type of therapies; how to improve combination therapy and immunotherapy; and how to improve melanoma patient awareness of different choices of therapies.

Following a full day and a half discussion of the above topics, the decision was made to form the following action groups that will pursue these various challenges:

1. Final annotation of melanoma specimen (histopathology, genomic markers) as well as clinical follow up to determine prognostic/predictive models, immune status, genetic signature predictive of resistance to treatment, assays that use paraffin (can go retrospective), polymorphisms to predict response to immune treatment (HLA). Investigators: Michael Krauthammer, Jeff Gershenwald, Jeff Lee (leaders), Marcus Bosenberg, David Rimm, David Elder, Lyn Duncan, Jennifer McNiff, Victor Prieto, Mario Sznol
2. Establis Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for snap-frozen tissue and blood collections, DNA, RNA, protein extraction.
   Investigators: Jeff Lee, Marcus Bosenberg (leaders), Kate Nathanson, Jeff Gershenwald, Keith Flaherty
3. MelaGRID, Exchange environment/portal to share tissue data and “omics” data. Investigators: Michael Krauthammer (leader), Tom Kupper, Kate Nathanson, Jeffrey E. Gershenwald, Marty Tenenbaum
4. Intellectual property issues in a collaborative exchange environment.
   Investigators: Meenhard Herlyn (leader), Tom Kupper, Liz Grimm, Ruth Halaban, John Kirkwood
5. Negotiate with CTEP and pharmaceutical companies to allow the use of novel drugs in combination in pre- and clinical trials; political lobbying.
   Investigators: Michael Atkins, Mario Sznol (leaders), Keith Flaherty, John Kirkwood, Patrick Hwu, Randy Lomax.
6. Patient advocate issues, how to improve patient access to information regarding alternative treatments, how patient advocate can leverage their weight and lobby for preclinical studies on combination therapy with novel drugs
   Investigators: Roz Meyer, Michael Atkins (leaders), Robert Heffernan, Harriet Kluger, Bonnie E. Gould Rothberg, Randy Lomax