Melanoma
The Role of Neutrophilic Inflammation, Angiotropism, and Pericytic Mimicry in Melanoma Progression and Metastasis
Angiotropism in melanoma correlates with ulceration and poor prognosis. It has been shown to be a marker of pericytic mimicry, that is, the spreading of tumor cells in a pericyte location along abluminal vascular surfaces. Such extravascular tumor spread may represent another form of tumor plasticity with reversion to a neural crest cell migratory phenotype. In a murine melanoma model, it has recently been demonstrated that neutrophilic skin inflammation promotes angiotropism and metastatic spread of primary melanomas.Telomerase Expression by Aberrant Methylation of the TERT Promoter in Melanoma Arising in Giant Congenital Nevi
Telomeres are tandem repeats of the noncoding DNA structures at the end of human chromosomes that protect the coding DNA and the integrity of the genome (Blackburn, 1991). The ability to sustain telomere length confers unlimited proliferative capacity to cancer cells. In most cancers telomere length is maintained by the activity of the enzyme telomerase (Kim et al., 1994), whose catalytic subunit is encoded by the telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) gene. However, until recently, the underlying mechanisms for telomerase activation in cancer cells were largely unknown.
