Background
Immuno-oncology therapies are now part of the standard of care for cancer in many indications. However, durable
Conclusion
Thus, this minimally invasive technique is an important refinement for the pharmacodynamic analysis of the TME facilitating paired evaluation of treatment response biomarkers with outcomes and reducing the number of animals used in preclinical research.
Methods
To address this, we developed and validated a novel non-terminal tumor sampling method to enable biopsy of the TME in mouse models based on fine needle aspiration.
Results
We show that this technique enables repeated in-life sampling of subcutaneous flank tumors and yields sufficient material to support downstream analyses of tumor-infiltrating immune cells using methods such as flow cytometry and single-cell transcriptomics. Moreover, using this technique we demonstrate that we can link TME biomarkers to treatment response outcomes, which is not possible using the current method of terminal tumor sampling.