Abstract 86: Deep immuno-profiling of syngeneic tumor mouse models for preclinical studies
Authors: Joachim Anais , Maturin Emilie , Mello Marielle , Hadjem Lilia , Grange Magali , Deas Olivier , Zarubica Ana , Malissen Bernard , Luche Hervé , Romagne François , Blanchin Stéphanie 
Published: March 2024

The identification of the major cellular players involved in the progression of a type of cancer is a key step for the success of new immunotherapies for personalized medicine. Immune cells play critical functions in cancer, and mice with intact immune systems are vital to understanding tumor immunology. It is however a daunting challenge as complex relationships interplay between tumor cells and the immune system. Each component of innate immunity or adaptive immunity, such as T lymphocytes, macrophages or neutrophils, may be directed to a pro- or anti-tumor function. In order to cope with the complexity of the tumor microenvironment, it is necessary to use an experimental approach capable of characterizing the heterogeneity of the cell types present in the tumor, the evolution of their relative proportion and their fine-tuned functional specificity. This approach leads to the identification of new cellular biomarkers of different stages of tumor progression in order to identify new targets for therapeutic time-window of and improve cancer diagnosis

To decipher the impact of immunotherapy treatments involved in the anti-tumor response, cellular phenotyping of leukocytes infiltrating a tumor but also those present in peripheral organs is necessary. Essentially based on extracellular labeling, this primary screen aims to quantify the different cell populations present in a syngenic tumor models on B6/N or BalbC genetical backgrounds. In order to increase our understanding in the precise mode of action of anti-PD1 treatment at the cellular level in sensitive and unsensitive models, we investigated immunophenotypes and responses to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) of several hallmark syngeneic tumor models (MC38, CT26, B16F10, B16-OVA, RENCA, EMT6) in immunocompetent mouse models by flow and mass cytometry. We compared growth kinetics and profiled the immune cell composition of tumor microenvironment (TME), draining lymph node (dLN) and blood in order to establish immune-phenotypic cell signatures that correlates with treatment efficacy. Supervised, unsupervised and integrative data analysis as well as visualization tools are used to identify significant changes across different experimental settings. Our results indicate that each model possesses a unique tumor-immune infiltrate profile that can be modulated with immunotherapies.

Overall, these studies provide an important resource of highly-characterized syngeneic tumor model and highlight the importance of tumor immune landscape variance across models that will drive selecting the most appropriate model to test novel immunotherapeutic agents and enhance our translation of knowledge from syngeneic models to human tumors.

Citation Format: Anais Joachim, Emilie Maturin, Marielle Mello, Lilia Hadjem, Magali Grange, Olivier Deas, Ana Zarubica, Bernard Malissen, Hervé Luche, François Romagne, Stéphanie Blanchin. Deep immuno-profiling of syngeneic tumor mouse models for preclinical studies [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 86.