A microRNA based prognostic service that predicts melanoma metastasis likelihood

ABSTRACT Melanoma is a highly prevalent cancer that kills patients by metastasizing and destroying distal organs. To date, there are no effective molecular prognostic services available for stratifying patients that are at high risk for metastatic relapsein the adjuvant setting. By stratifying patients into high-risk versus low-risk, therapies could be tailored to those patients that stand to benefit from treatment while sparing those patients who will not relapse and not require costly and potentially harmful therapies. Recent research identified three miRNAs (miR-1908, miR-199a5p, and miR-199a3p) that are overexpressed in metastatic melanoma cells and inhibit expression of apolipoprotein A (ApoE), a metastasis suppressor in melanoma. Cancer-cell secretedApoE prevents cellular invasion and metastatic endothelial recruitment through engaging melanoma cell LRP1 and endothelial cell LRP8 receptors, respectively. Importantly, elevated expression levels of miRNAs in primary tumor samples performs robustly in s