Prognostic significance of tissue proteomic profiling in stage I and II cutaneous malignant melanoma of the head and neck

Introduction:

Morphohistopathological parameters are the basis for malignant melanoma classification and prognosis. An increasing number of molecular biomarkers offers a new potential for refining diagnostic and prognostic disease categories. Early stage disease prognosis is only partially encompassed by morphological and histopathological parameters such as primary tumor localization, patient age and gender, mitotic rate, lesion thickness and presence of ulceration.

Methods:

This study is based on tissue proteomic profiling of 31 early stage head and neck malignant melanoma tissue samples with an additional 6 pooled benign pigmented nevi tissue analyzed as control samples. After identifying their proteomic profile, individual proteins were correlated with established prognostic factors and patient survival through recursive partitioning (rpart, program language R).

After proteomic profiling was completed, possible relationships between individual protein expression levels and disease specific survival were analyzed and new, previously unreported proteins were identified as possible prognostic biomarkers; heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein M, heat shock protein 90 alpha, profilin-1, tubulin, beta chain, annexin-5 and ribosomal protein L7.

Conclusion:

The expression level of heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein M was identifed as the principal prognostic factor in our data set by recursive partitioning. It appears to be independent of all other prognostic factors, statistically significant and clinically relevant due to an exceedingly high hazard ratio. This expands our knowledge on existing and newly discovered melanoma proteins in relation to their prognostic value in early disease stages.

Publication History

Publication Date:
18 April 2018 (online)