Project description:The phenomenon that metastatic lesion developed on injured sites has long been recognized in a number of cancers, such as melanoma. The factors associated with wound healing that attract circulating tumor cells have remained unknown, however. A patient with acral lentiginous melanoma presented with a metastatic lesion that appeared 1 month after trauma. To explore the molecular mechanism underlying the promotion of wound metastasis in melanoma, we performed microarray analysis of the metastatic lesions (n = 2) and the primary lesions (n = 3) of the patient. Using Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 array, we compared global gene expression profiles of tissues derived from the patient’s primary (n = 3) and wound metastatic (n = 2) lesions to search for particular biological functions in genes of which expression intensities were increased in the wound metastasic lesions of melanoma.
Project description:The phenomenon that metastatic lesion developed on injured sites has long been recognized in a number of cancers, such as melanoma. The factors associated with wound healing that attract circulating tumor cells have remained unknown, however. A patient with acral lentiginous melanoma presented with a metastatic lesion that appeared 1 month after trauma. To explore the molecular mechanism underlying the promotion of wound metastasis in melanoma, we performed microarray analysis of the metastatic lesions (n = 2) and the primary lesions (n = 3) of the patient.
Project description:Uveal melanoma is an aggressive cancer that metastasizes to the liver in about half of patients, being at that time almost always fatal. Identification of patients at high risk of metastases may provide indication for a frequent follow-up for early detection of metastases and treatment. The analysis of the gene expression profiling of primary human uveal melanomas showed high expression of SDCBP (encoding for syndecan-binding protein-1 or syntenin-1), which appeared higher in patients with recurrence, whereas expression of syndecans was lower and unrelated to progression. Moreover, we found that high expression of SDCBP gene was related to metastatic progression in two additional independent dataset of uveal melanoma patients. More importantly, immunohistochemistry showed that high expression of syntenin-1 protein in primary tumours was significantly related to metastatic recurrence in our cohort of patients. Syntenin-1 expression was confirmed by RT-PCR, immunofluorescence and immunohistochemistry in cultured uveal melanoma cells or primary tumours. A pseudo-metastatic model of uveal melanoma to the liver was developed in NOD/SCID/IL2R null mice and the study of syntenin-1 expression in primary and metastatic lesions revealed higher syntenin-1 expression in metastases. The inhibition of SDCBP expression by siRNA impaired the ability of uveal melanoma cells to migrate in a wound–healing assay. These results suggest that SDCBP is involved in uveal melanoma progression and that it represents a candidate molecular marker of metastases and a potential therapeutic target.
Project description:Epigenetic alterations play significant roles in the melanoma tumorigenesis and malignant progression. We profiled genome-wide promoter DNA methylation patterns of melanoma cells deribed from primary lesions of Radial Growrth phase (RGP) and Vertical Growth Phase (VGP), metastatic lesions, and primary normal melanocytes by interrogating 14,495 genes using Illumina bead chip technology. By comparative analysis of the promoter methylation profiles, we identified epigenetically silenced gene signatures that potentially associated with malignant melanoma progression. Bisulphite converted genomic DNA from a group of melanoma cells representing pathologic stages of melanoma progression (3 cell lines derived from RGP melanoma lesions, 4 cell lines derived from VGP lesions, and 3 melastatic melanomas) and normal human primary melanocytes isolated from lightly pigmented adult skin were hybridized to Illumina's Infinium HumanMethylation27 BeadChips