Predominance of central memory T cells with high T-cell receptor repertoire diversity is associated with response to PD-1/PD-L1 inhibition in Merkel cell carcinoma

Ivelina Spassova1*, Selma Ugurel2*, Patrick Terheyden3, Antje Sucker2, Jessica Hassel4, Cathrin Ritter1, Linda Kubat1, Daniel Habermann5, Farnoush Farahpour5, Mohammadkarim Saeedghalati5, Lukas Peiffer1,6, Rajiv Kumar6,7, David Schrama8, Daniel Hoffmann5, Dirk Schadendorf2, Jürgen C. Becker1,2,6* 1Translational Skin Cancer Research, German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research (Deutsches Konsortium für Translationale Krebsforschung; DKTK), Essen, Germany. 2Department of Dermatology, University Hospital of Essen, Essen, Germany. 3Department of Dermatology, University Hospital of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany. 4Department of Dermatology, University Hospital of Heidelberg, Germany. 5Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany. 6German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungs Zentrum, DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany 7Division of Molecular Genetic Epidemiology, Heidelberg, Germany. 8Department of Dermatology, University Hospital of Würzburg, Germany. *equal contribution