As rates rise, researchers find better way to identif...(sily mistaken for melanoma but is not ca...)

Pathologists play a major role in diagnosing and staging skin cancers, by sorting through neoplasms and identifying features. They analyze cells within the lesions and apply chemical stains and other tools to measure the depth and predict future behavior of the growths.

This study by Pryor and co-authors showed why IMP-3 might be an important tool for pathologists. None of the benign moles or the benign moles with irregular features and some abnormal cells over-expressed the IMP-3 protein. However, the protein was produced excessively in most melanomas, and overly expressed more often in metastatic melanomas.

IMP-3 was also over-expressed in rare cases of invasive thin melanomas. This is significant because most thin melanomas have a good prognosis, but some act more aggressively and currently there is no accurate way to distinguish between the types of thin lesions.

IMP-3 is an insulin-like growth factor-II mRNA binding protein. It is involved in cell proliferation and appears to play a role in tumor formation in a number of cancers.

In previous studies expression of the IMP-3 protein has been linked to pancreas, kidney, ovary and lung cancers, but this is the first published study to demonstrate a connection to melanoma, Pryor said.

Additional research is needed to compare IMP-3 expression with long-term survival data from thin melanoma patients, to find out if patients whose tumors express IMP-3 might benefit from more careful monitoring and aggressive treatment, the study noted.

The antibody used in this research was obtained from the Dako Corporation of California, through a collaborative arrangement initiated by the corresponding author, Haodong Xu, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at URMC. Xu and his colleagues have previously published studies of IMP-
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