Researchers make sense out of the chaos of melanoma

Source: Medical Express, February 2019

Melanoma is one of the most aggressive tumours, with potential for metastasis from very early stages, when lesions are just millimetres thick. Most puzzling is that these metastases occur in an apparently chaotic way, as they involve many processes that occur simultaneously but do not appear to have a relationship among them.

Now, scientists from the Melanoma Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), together with the University Hospital 12 de Octubre, have found some order in this chaos through a research study that proves that these metastatic processes do not occur through independent mercenaries, but are rather coordinated by a general captain: the p62 protein.

Furthermore, the study reports that one of these proteins controlled by p62 is FERMT2, which had not been previously linked to metastasis in melanoma, and shows that both FERMT2 and p62 could represent a marker for poor patient prognosis. These important findings are published in Cancer Cell.