Malignant melanoma has the highest increase of incidence of malignancies in the western world. In early stages, front line therapy is surgical excision of the primary tumor. Metastatic disease has very limited possibilities for cure. Recently, several protein kinase inhibitors and immune modifiers have shown promising clinical results but drug resistance in metastasized melanoma remains a major...

BACKGROUND Uveal melanoma is the most common malignancy of the adult eye. The overall mortality rate is high because this aggressive cancer often metastasizes before ophthalmic diagnosis. Quantitative proteomic analysis of primary metastasizing and non-metastasizing tumors was pursued for insights into mechanisms and biomarkers of uveal melanoma metastasis. METHODS Eight metastatic and 7 non-...

  Background: Melanoma causes the greatest morbidity and mortality of all skin cancers. Mucosal melanoma is a rare but highly aggressive neoplasm. According to previous studies the prevalence of KIT mutations in acrallentiginous and mucosal melanomas is relatively low (less than 15–20%), but it can have profound therapeutic implications for localized high risk or metastatic diseases. Our goal w...

Although gastrointestinal involvement by metastatic malignant melanoma is common but primary gastrointestinal (GI) melanoma has been reported in rare cases. In this study we report two cases of primary gastrointestinal malignant melanoma that one of them is a known case of neurofibromatosis type 1(NF1). Both cases showed no evidence of any lesions in skin and eye. Malignant melanoma of GI tract...

PURPOSE Both phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/AKT and RAS/mitogen-activated protein kinase signal transduction pathways mediate 4E-BP1 phosphorylation, releasing 4E-BP1 from the mRNA cap and permitting translation initiation. Given the prevalence of PTEN and BRAF mutations in melanoma, we first examined translation initiation, as measured by phosphorylated 4E-BP1 (p-4E-BP1), in metastatic melanoma...

CCN3/nephroblastoma overexpressed belongs to the CCN family of genes that encode secreted proteins associated with the extracellular matrix (ECM) and exert regulatory effects at the cellular level. Overexpression of CCN3 was shown in metastatic melanoma cells compared with cells of the primary tumor from the same patient. Analysis of short-term cultures from 50 primary and metastatic melanomas ...

cytokines influence cell cycle events, which in some but not all instances can be associated with melanoma progression. analysis of the g0/g 1 and s phase fractions of the cell cycle was used to assay the proliferative or inhibitory activity of cytokines against ten human melanoma cell lines, including pairs of cell lines derived from primary and metastatic tissue of individual patients. cytoki...

Melanoma remains as the deadliest form of skin cancer with limited and inefficient treatment options available for patients with metastatic disease. Within the last decade, the thrombin receptor, Protease Activated Receptor-1, has been described as an essential gene involved in the progression of human melanoma. PAR-1 is known to activate adhesive, invasive and angiogenic factors to promote mel...

Since there are only a few tissue markers used in the routine histopathology of melanoma, is an unmet need for novel protein discovery both prognostic and predictive implications. Our introduction formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) melanoma samples provides new opportunities to understand progression melanoma. The study was based on previously archived 175 human FFPE primary metastatic whi...

background: melanoma causes the greatest morbidity and mortality of all skin cancers. mucosal melanoma is a rare but highly aggressive neoplasm. according to previous studies the prevalence of kit mutations in acrallentiginous and mucosal melanomas is relatively low (less than 15–20%), but it can have profound therapeutic implications for localized high risk or metastatic diseases. our goal was...