The Personalised Immunotherapy Platform (PIP) is a tool developed by Melanoma Institute Australia to ensure advanced melanoma patients receive effective treatment the first time, based on their own genetics and tumour biology. PIP enables the identification of patients who are likely to respond to standard treatments and those that require novel agents as part of a clinical trial to save their life.

The PIP study has two stages:

The first is PIP-PREDICT which involves the pilot implementation of a panel of predictive tests utilising clinical factors and different properties of the tumour in a clinical setting in order to identify the patients who will not benefit from the standard-of-care immunotherapies and require a novel clinical trial agent. The data generated will be entered into a biomarker patient report, detailing the likelihood of a patient’s response to the standard immunotherapies and the suggested treatment based on their
clinical and tumour profiles. A pilot study (open in March 2021) is ongoing in order to prospectively validate PIP-PREDICT model.

The second stage of the study is to assess the effectiveness of five novel agents in treatment-naïve pts predicted to be resistant to either anti-PD-1 alone or combined with ipilimumab.

The current research program will change the way that cancer patients are treated and selected for clinical trials, by moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach to the use of a precision approach to deliver effective immunotherapies on a personal basis. This platform will increase anti-tumour responses, reduce drug-related side effects, and reduce costs to the health care system.