The Tongren-Ophthalmology Research Association of Clinical Evaluation - Uveal Melanoma (TRACE-UM): Objectives, Design, Current Results, and Outlook

Purpose Tumor metastasis is the leading cause of death in uveal melanoma. To date, there is no effective treatment for metastatic uveal melanoma. We present a novel research paradigm, Tongren-Ophthalmology Research Association of Clinical Evaluation - Uveal Melanoma (TRACE-UM), designed to identify new risk factors, biomarkers and molecular mechanisms for uveal melanoma metastasis. Methods TRACE-UM utilizes real-world data of patients treated at a Chinese tertiary center. Sources of data include clinical information, tumor tissue and blood samples collected at diagnosis and follow-up visits. Bulk RNA sequencing and single-cell RNA sequencing were performed to explore molecular mechanisms and biomarkers of tumor metastasis. Artificial intelligence computation was employed to build metastasis prediction models using clinical and imaging data. Spatial transcriptome sequencing technology was incorporated to analyze the mechanisms of vascular mimicry. Results We recruited consecutive patients diagnosed with uveal melanoma from August 2014 to January 2020. Demographic and clinical data on 1166 patients and pathological data on 203 patients were collected. TRACE-UM has thus far contributed to two areas of research: (1) clinical prediction models were constructed to predict the risk of metastasis after treatment; (2) the molecular mechanism of metastasis was preliminarily elucidated. Conclusion TRACE-UM provides a unique clinical database and biobank repository collection initiative. Using this large real-world data set, we explored metastatic mechanisms, biomarkers and validated them through cellular and animal experiments. TRACE-UM has the potential to serve as an infrastructure for future clinical trials.