Paraneoplastic vitelliform retinopathy is a rare condition associated with metastatic melanoma. Like melanomaassociated retinopathy (MAR), it can cause nyctalopia and progressive vision loss; however, unlike MAR, the fundus shows multifocal, yellow-orange vitelliform lesions beneath the neurosensory retina and at the level of the retinal pigment epithelium, as well as areas of subretinal fluid ...

Targeted therapies have drastically changed the management of metastatic melanoma and have shown encouraging results on tumour progression but are also known for their high rates of adverse reactions. In general, targeted therapies are contraindicated during pregnancy due to concerns about teratogenesis. For the BRAF V600 inhibitor vemurafenib, the available literature about the effects on huma...

Introduction: Pembrolizumab (Keytruda®) is a potent and selective humanized monoclonal immunoglobulin antibody that blocks programmed cell death-1 on T cells, augmenting the antitumor immune response. an approved adjuvant therapy for treating metastatic melanoma.

PURPOSE Certain clinicopathologic features correlate with BRAF mutation status in melanoma including younger age and primary subtype. This study sought to determine the BRAF mutation status by age-decade and whether BRAF-mutant genotypes correlated with clinicopathologic features and outcome in patients with metastatic melanoma. METHODS A prospectively assembled cohort of Australian patients ...

The interleukin (IL)-6 inhibits the growth of early-stage melanoma cells, but not metastatic cells. Metastatic melanoma cells are susceptible to statin-induced apoptosis, but this is not clear for early-stage melanoma cells. This study aimed to investigate the IL-6 susceptibility of melanoma cells from different stages in the presence of simvastatin to overcome loss of growth arrest. ELISA was ...

Metastatic melanoma is an aggressive skin cancer associated with poor prognosis. The reactivation of the embryonic morphogen Nodal in metastatic melanoma has previously been shown to regulate the aggressive behavior of these tumor cells. During the establishment of left-right asymmetry in early vertebrate development, Nodal expression is specifically regulated by a Notch signaling pathway. We h...

Nuclear factor of activated T cell (NFAT1, NFATC2) is a transcription factor that binds and positively regulates IL2 expression during T-cell activation. NFAT1 has important roles in both innate and adaptive immune responses, but its involvement in cancer is not completely understood. We previously demonstrated that NFAT1 contributes to melanoma growth and metastasis by regulating the autotaxin...

Metastasis is the leading cause of death in patients with advanced melanoma, yet the somatic alterations that aid tumour cell dissemination and colonisation are poorly understood. Here, we deploy comparative genomics to identify and validate clinically relevant drivers of melanoma metastasis. To do this, we identified a set of 976 genes whose expression level was associated with a poor outcome ...

Combination therapies for the treatment of metastatic melanoma are a matter of debate nowadays. We report on a stage IV metastatic melanoma patient with the BRAF V600 mutation and a large tumor burden initially treated with two cycles of ipilimumab. Due to dramatic disease progression, demonstrated on interim 18F-FDG PET/CT, vemurafenib was added in the patient's therapeutical scheme. After com...

Background Immunotherapies that target immune-checkpoint molecules such PD-1 have helped to achieve durable responses in melanoma treatment. However, 25% of melanoma patients who showed objective responses to PD-1 blockade develop resistance and suffer from disease progression and ultimately death, which necessitates the identification of related resistance mechanisms.IL-34 is a cytokine that c...