Melanoma metastatic to the appendix is extremely rare. Here we describe a case of a 31-year-old female from Bolivia with a remote history of metastatic malignant melanoma first diagnosed as a cutaneous malignant melanoma ten years prior to this presentation. The patient was being followed for a mucocele which on resection was found to be metastatic melanoma. "Mucocele" is a generic diagnosis th...

Although rare, uveal melanoma is the most common primary intraocular malignant tumor in adults. Over the past 50 years, the incidence in North America has been stable, with 4.3 per million (or about 1,500 cases per year) being newly diagnosed (Sato, Han, & Yamamoto, 2008). Uveal melanoma differs from cutaneous melanoma in a variety of ways, such as primary treatment, metastatic pattern, and ove...

Metastatic pancreatic malignant melanoma is considered to be a highly aggressive neoplasm, and only few metastasectomies for lesions originating from the skin or the ocular region have been reported. We report a case of resection of pancreatic metastasis of malignant melanoma originating from the nasal cavity. An isolated pancreatic tumor was detected in a 46-year-old man who had undergone prot...

Malignant melanoma is a heterogeneous, malignant neoplastic disease, most often originating in the skin. Melanoma is characterized by a high mutational load and has a vastly variable prognosis, depending on disease stage. Genetic aberrations in the mitogen-activating protein kinase (MAPK) pathway are important in melanoma, of which mutations in BRAF and NRAS are the most common. Additionally, r...

Human metastatic melanoma cells express a dedifferentiated, plastic phenotype, which may serve as a selective advantage, because melanoma cells invade various microenvironments. Over the last three decades, there has been an increased focus on the role of the tumor microenvironment in cancer progression, with the goal of reversing the metastatic phenotype. Here, using an embryonic chick model, ...

Metastatic melanoma is well known for its aggressive clinical behavior and therapeutic resistance. The standard systemic therapy has shown limited clinical activity with no significant survival benefit. Melanoma is a molecularly heterogeneous malignancy. Several key genetic lesions governing melanoma initiation and progression have been identified, the most common being a point mutation in the ...

We previously isolated a partial cDNA fragment of a novel gene, Elm1 (expressed in low-metastatic cells), that is expressed in low-metastatic but not in high-metastatic K-1735 mouse melanoma cells. Here we determined the full-length cDNA structure of Elm1 and investigated the effect of Elm1 expression on growth and metastatic potential of K-1735 cells. The Elm1 gene encodes a predicted protein ...

PURPOSE Establish an experimental model of metastatic melanoma primary culture cells from fine-needle aspiration biopsies (FNAB). METHODS Two metastatic melanoma primary culture cells from (FNAB) have been developed from patients who had been submitted to excision of metastatic lesions and they were identified by immunohistochemical analyses using S-100 and MB-45 melanoma markers. RESULTS T...

Epigenetic alterations are increasingly implicated in metastasis, whereas very few genetic mutations have been identified as authentic drivers of cancer metastasis. Yet, to date, few studies have identified metastasis-related epigenetic drivers, in part because a framework for identifying driver epigenetic changes in metastasis has not been established. Using reduced representation bisulfite se...