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Purpose To determine the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) of autologous chimeric antigen receptor T cells (HER2-CART) after lymphodepletion and to describe the cellular kinetics, safety, feasibility of repeat treatment cycles, and antitumor activity of HER2-CART in patients with advanced sarcoma. Patients and Methods On this phase I study, 13 patients with progressive, metastatic HER2+ sarcoma were treated in 14 enrollments; one patient who achieved complete remission was re-enrolled because of disease recurrence. Lymphodepletion consisted of fludarabine (Flu) 25 mg/m2/dose x 5 days with or without cyclophosphamide (Cy) 30 mg/kg/dose x 2 days. The dose cohorts evaluated include 1x108 total T-cells/m2 after Flu (cohort A); 1x108 total T-cells/m2 after Flu/Cy (cohort B) and 1x108 CAR-positive T-cells/m2 after Flu/Cy (cohort C). The evaluation of safety was the primary endpoint. Secondary outcomes included assessment of cellular kinetics and antitumor activity. Results All study participants received at least one infusion of HER2-CART after lymphodepletion and were included in the analysis (median age 14 years; range 4-55 years). Seven received multiple HER2-CART infusions. CART expansion was observed after all but two of 21 total infusions given after lymphodepletion. Nine of 12 (75%) patients in cohorts A and B developed grade 1-2 CRS. Two patients in cohort C experienced dose limiting toxicity (DLT) with grade 3-4 CRS. All patients recovered from treatment-related adverse events during study follow-up. Median OS was 8.2 months (95% CI, 4.4-17 months). Antitumor activity was observed at the MTD (cohort B), with 1-year OS and PFS of 62.5% (95% CI, 22.9%-86.1%) and 33.3% (95% CI, 7.8-62.3%), respectively. Three patients remain alive, with one in long-term remission at the sixth year of follow-up. While infused CART products did not exhibit a distinct immunophenotype by sarcoma histology, we observed different trends in expression of immune checkpoints when compared by disease and by treatment response. Conclusion and Relevance: Autologous HER2-CART can be infused safely after lymphodepletion in patients with progressive sarcoma, and the preliminary evidence of antitumor activity observed supports testing their efficacy in a phase II trial. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00902044

Pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma (PPGL) are rare neuroendocrine tumors in childhood. Cancer predisposition syndromes (CPS) are increasingly recognized as the underlying cause for a number of pediatric malignancies and up to 40% of PPGL are currently thought to be associated with a hereditary predisposition1,2. With the increasingly widespread availability of functional molecular imaging techniques, nuclear medicine imaging modalities such as 18F-FDG-PET/CT, 123I-MIBG SPECT/CT, and 68Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT now play an essential role in the staging, response assessment and determination of suitability for targeted radiotherapy in patients with PPGL. Each of these imaging modalities targets a different cellular characteristic, such as glucose metabolism (FDG), norepinephrine transporter expression (MIBG), or somatostatin receptor expression (DOTATATE), and therefore can be complementary to anatomic imaging and to each other. Given the recent FDA approval3 and increasing use of 68Ga-DOTATATE for imaging in children4, the purpose of this article is to use a case-based approach to highlight both the advantages and limitations of DOTATATE imaging as it compares to current radiologic imaging techniques in the staging and response assessment of pediatric PPGL, and to offer a decision algorithm for the use of functional imaging that can be applied to PPGL, as well as other neuroendocrine malignancies.

Objective: Outcomes for patients with metastatic or relapsed osteosarcoma (OS) remain poor. Many OS samples have demonstrated a high proportion of mutational signature 3 (ms3), suggestive of homologous recombination DNA repair deficiency (HRD) or a BRCAness molecular phenotype. The HRD score, which quantifies chromosomal structural rearrangements by combining loss of heterozygosity (LOH), large state transitions (LST), and telomere allelic imbalances (TAI), has been used to assess HRD status in patients with breast and ovarian cancer, with high scores found to be predictive of PARP inhibitor sensitivity. While high HRD scores have been described in OS, little is known about how HRD scores vary by stage, site, pre vs post-therapy, presence of homologous recombination pathway or TP53 alterations, and their correlation to ms3 contribution. Methods: To address this issue, we evaluated 48 OS samples with tumor purity ≥ 20% from 46 patients who had 80x whole genome sequencing (WGS) performed through our pediatric expanded genomics platform. HRD scores were then estimated using scarHRD, a computational tool, which quantifies LOH, LST, and TAI events from WGS data and has shown a good correlation to SNP-array based methods. Results: Of the 48 samples analyzed, 25 samples were from primary sites and 23 from metastatic sites of disease. The median HRD score was 45 with a minimum score of 6 and a maximum score of 79. The 25th, 75th, and 90th percentiles of values were 35.7, 57, and 66.3 respectively. There was a significant difference in HRD score in patients with localized disease (n=22) vs metastatic disease (n=26) at time of diagnosis with median HRD (mHRD) scores of 41 and 51.5 (p = 0.027). The presence of a TP53 structural variant or single nucleotide variant (mHRD=47) was associated with higher HRD scores than TP53 wild-type samples (mHRD=29.5, p=0.04). There was no statistically significant difference in HRD scores in pre vs post-treated samples or primary site vs metastatic site samples. Samples with homologous recombination pathway alterations (n=10) were not associated with increased HRD score. There was a positive correlation (Spearman’s rho=0.425, p=0.001) between the number of mutations attributed to ms3 and HRD score. Conclusions: The range and distribution of HRD scores in our OS cohort closely resemble BRCA1/2 deficient breast cancer. Patients with metastatic disease at diagnosis were found to have higher HRD scores, representing a higher degree of genomic instability and increasing potential to accumulate resistance mutations. Higher HRD scores in TP53 mutated samples may be due to chromosomal instability caused by mechanisms other than HRD. The BRCAness phenotype in OS is now being targeted in a phase II clinical trial, combining the PARP inhibitor olaparib with the ATR inhibitor ceralasertib (NCT0441706), which includes integrated correlative biology to prospectively assess biomarkers of response such as HRD score. Citation Format: Michael David Kinnaman, Julia Pena, Max Levine, Nancy Bouvier, Elli Papaemmanuil, Suzanne Forrest, Katherine Janeway, Paul Meyers, Julia Glade Bender. Analysis of homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) scores in osteosarcoma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 2590.

Despite many clinical trials, outcome for osteosarcoma (OS) patients remains poor, especially for those with metastatic or relapsed/refractory disease. We leveraged network-based systems biology approaches to discover Master Regulator (MR) proteins representing pharmacologically accessible, mechanistic determinants of OS cell state, and to dissect tumor transcriptional heterogeneity. MRs were identified by interrogating an OS regulatory network—generated from 87 RNAseq profiles in the TARGET OS cohort—with gene expression signatures from 149 diagnostic OS samples, using the VIPER algorithm. RNAseq profiles were generated in four sarcoma cell lines following perturbation with ~400 oncology drugs, and used to identify drugs capable of inverting MR activity profiles with the OncoTreat algorithm. Unsupervised, protein activity-based clustering of the samples identified two clusters, characterized by a significant overall survival difference (76% vs 38%, log-rank p-val 0.0041). Patients in the high-risk cluster presented aberrant activity of proteins involved in cell cycle (FOXM1, CENPF, TOP2A) and epigenetic remodeling (EZH2, KDM1A), while those in the low-risk cluster had aberrant activity of proteins involved in immune response (VAV1, CD86, CEBPE), interferon gama signaling (IRF5, MNDA), and senescence control (CREG1, TFEC). We further identified patients with metastatic disease and particularly poor outcome ( Citation Format: Somnath Tagore, Jovana Pavisic, Aaron T. Griffin, Katherine Janeway, Andrew L. Kung, Filemon Dela Cruz, Alejandro Sweet-Cordero, Inge Behroozfard, Stanley Leung, Alex Lee, Darrell Yamashiro, Julia Glade Bender, Andrea Califano. A systems biology approach to defining tumor heterogeneity and prognostic and targetable master regulator protein signatures from bulk and single-cell RNAseq in osteosarcoma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 488.

Ongoing pre-clinical efforts aim to deploy genome-scale CRISPR/Cas9 technology and large collections of small molecules to catalog maps of cancer vulnerabilities at scale. However, such efforts in pediatric and rare cancers have lagged behind comparable efforts in more common cancer types due to the dearth of cell models. Here, we present an update from our “Cancer Cell Line Factory” project on efforts to overcome key laboratory and biologistics challenges precluding progress in pediatric and rare cancers. This effort, now in it’s 3rd year, represents an industry scale pipeline aiming to generate, characterize and share novel cancer models of many tumor types with the scientific community. Overall, we have processed 1153 samples from 818 patients across over 16 cancer types through this pipeline with a 28% success rate overall, including over 350 patient samples from rare and pediatric cancers. To optimize conditions for each tumor type, we have systematically compared published methods including (1) next-generation 2-dimension, (2) organoid and (3) standard approaches and have captured all information with a data management system that should enhance the ability to predict optimal ex vivo propagation conditions for future samples. Among the successful cell models verified already as part of this effort, we have generated a series of over 30 unique pediatric and rare cancer models, many of which represent the first of their kind. We screened these and other models against a library of highly annotated 440 small molecules that were previously tested against 860 existing cancer cell lines. Our results suggest that dependency data generated with novel next-generation cell cultures is potentially backwards-compatible with existing small molecule dependency datasets. Furthermore, we tested the novel Broad Institute Drug Repurposing library consisting of 4100 approved therapeutics, or those under investigation for any disease, against the first cell line models of several of these rare next generation models including angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma and renal medullary carcinoma, leading to several novel drug repurposing hypotheses for rare cancers. Given these proof-of-concept studies, in partnership with the Rare Cancer Research Foundation, we launched an online matchmaking platform to connect patients with rare cancers to available research studies, facilitate online consent and provide biologistics support to enable fresh tissue donation to support cancer model generation from any clinical site in the United States. We will present results from this novel direct-to-patient approach to facilitate the generation of even larger numbers of next generation models from rare and pediatric cancers, propelling the generation of pre-clinical dependency maps of these tumors for the scientific community. Citation Format: Yuen-Yi Tseng, Andrew Hong, Paula Keskula, Shubhroz Gill, Jaime Cheah, Grigoriy Kryukov, Aviad Tsherniak, Francisca Vazquez, Glenn Cowley, Sahar Alkhairy, Coyin Oh, Anson Peng, Rebecca Deasy, Abeer Sayeed, Peter Ronning, Samuel Ng, Steven Corsello, Corrie Painter, David Sandak, Levi Garraway, Mark Rubin, Calvin Kuo, Sidharth Puram, David Weinstock, Adam Bass, Nikhil Wagle, Keith Ligon, Katherine Janeway, David Root, Stuart Schreiber, Paul Clemons, Aly Shamji, Aly Shamji, William Hahn, Todd Golub, Jesse Boehm. Accelerating prediction of pediatric and rare cancer vulnerabilities using next-generation cancer models [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 1953. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-1953

For the vast majority of cancer patients, existing knowledge of the function(s) of the mutant genes harbored by their tumor and the dependencies they induce is incomplete or non-existent since most cancer mutations are exceedingly rare. As a result, we now have long lists of candidate alleles but a paucity of targets whose biology is sufficiently well understood to guide therapeutics. Here we present an interim progress report on a pilot effort aiming to create a generalizable framework to systematically map the molecular consequences of cancer variants at scale (Target Accelerator). First, we created an efficient pipeline to generate cancer variants and generated an initial library of 1300 mutant cDNA clones corresponding to variants in lung cancer and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma as well as those nominated by “pan-cancer” computational analyses. Second, we established an industry-scale, next-generation pipeline to generate new cancer models (Cell Line Factory) directly from patient samples. We have leveraged this pipeline to process over 330 samples from 208 patients across 16 cancer types, with over 60% growing through at least 5 population doublings. We show that tumor genomics can be retained in such patient-derived models and that drug testing within 3 months is feasible. In addition, we use combinatorial molecular barcoding to rapidly generate a panel of pathway-primed human tumorigenesis models that are suitable for massively parallel multiplexed tumorigenesis assays in vivo (TumorPlex). We hypothesized that this integrated framework could be utilized to generate meaningful functional hypotheses in a high-throughput manner. To test this hypothesis, we introduced over 1000 cancer mutations into cell models and created gene expression signatures together with phenotypic data. In lung cancer, we show that the mutational impact of mutant alleles with known and unknown functions can be rapidly assessed by comparing signatures of wild-type and mutant alleles. We show that this generalizable approach, which does not require prior knowledge, can place variants of unknown significance into dominant gain-of-function and loss-of-function categories. As a complementary approach, we have used TumorPlex assays to test the tumorigenic potential of 550 mutant alleles nominated by Pan-Cancer computational analyses and discovered unexpected variants in the KRAS, AKT1, MAP2K1, ERBB2, PIK3CB, NFE2L2, FAM200A and POT1 genes as being potently tumorigenic. These proof-of-concept studies demonstrate initial feasibility of mapping cancer variant function at scale. Importantly, they demarcate a path by which mapping variant function and predicting vulnerabilities might soon be possible on a patient-by-patient basis, achieving the promise of precision functional genomics. Citation Format: Alice Berger, Eejung Kim, Angela Brooks, Yashaswi Shrestha, Yuen-Yi Tseng, Xiaoyun Wu, Nina Ilic, Lihua Zou, Atanas Kamburov, Xiaoping Yang, Cong Zhu, Paula Keskula, Sara Seepo, Andrew Hong, John Doench, Aravind Subramanian, Keith Ligon, Philip Kantoff, Katherine Janeway, Levi Garraway, David Root, Todd Golub, Matthew Meyerson, William Hahn, Gad Getz, Jesse Boehm. Towards precision functional genomics via next-generation functional mapping of cancer variants. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2015 Apr 18-22; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2015;75(15 Suppl):Abstract nr 957. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2015-957