Dermalogical Onclogy -Pumed

CONCLUSIONS: This study identifies specific dietary patterns and PA behaviors that may play a role in melanoma risk, highlighting the potential for personalized lifestyle-based prevention strategies.

Background and Objectives: This study aimed to identify the risk factors of primary cutaneous melanomas associated with microsatellites, satellites, and in-transit metastases. Materials and Methods: We performed a retrospective study on patients diagnosed with invasive primary cutaneous melanomas in two pathology departments. The cases were distributed into two groups, comparing the clinical-pathological features of cases that presented microsatellites, satellites, and in-transit metastases with...

CONCLUSION: CR201 and CR202 are domain-specific, dual-mechanism anti-CD73 antibodies that integrate potent enzymatic blockade with receptor internalization, thereby enhancing antitumor immune responses. These findings highlight the therapeutic potential of targeting distinct functional domains of CD73 to overcome adenosine-mediated immunosuppression in cancer.

Usnic acid (UA), a prominent lichen secondary metabolite, exhibits a unique dual therapeutic profile in dermatology, though its clinical translation is limited by systemic hepatotoxicity and poor solubility. This review comprehensively evaluates the topical efficacy, molecular mechanisms, and advanced formulation strategies of UA enantiomers and UA-rich extracts. A literature search across PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar identified 36 original publications focusing on anti-melanoma activity,...

Accurate staging of high-risk melanoma patients is imperative to ensure effective and appropriate therapy but also to estimate the potential risk of recurrence. Despite numerous studies previously conducted, no consensus has been reached on the optimal posttreatment follow-up method for high-risk melanoma patients. There are no clear indications for PET/CT in follow-up or initial staging of clinically asymptomatic high-risk melanoma patients. The aim of our study was to determine the predictive...

The shift toward precision medicine in cancer immunotherapy has increased demand for rapid, scalable production platforms for personalized vaccine antigens targeting neoantigens and tumor-associated antigens. Escherichia coli-based recombinant protein production represents a globally established system offering speed and cost-effectiveness, yet the immunogenic potential of soluble antigens produced via this platform remains incompletely characterized. Here, we systematically evaluated the...

Dear Editor, Melanoma is one of the most aggressive skin cancers, with rising global incidence (1). Prognosis is closely linked to the stage at diagnosis, with stage III, particularly cases involving lymph node metastases, carrying a high risk of relapse and mortality (2). Standard treatment includes wide local excision, sentinel lymph node biopsy, and systemic adjuvant therapy in metastatic cases (3). Despite these measures, five-year survival for stage IIIB melanoma remains significantly lower...

Melanoma is the most aggressive type of skin cancer, driven by early invasion, phenotypic plasticity, and frequent resistance to targeted therapies. Although genomic profiling informs treatment selection, genotype alone often fails to predict therapeutic response, underscoring the need for rapid and physiologically relevant functional testing platforms. Here, we present a three-dimensional melanoma-skin organoid (mSO) model that integrates primary skin cells with melanoma cell lines in a...

Dear Editor,Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common malignancy worldwide. As a pragmatic approach, European Consensus classified BCC as easy totreat and difficult to treat. They defined difficulttotreat BCC as all locally advanced BCCs and also common BCCs with management problems due to technical difficulties or conditions related to the patient (1). Even surgery is the gold standard treatment for difficult to treat BCC; considering the treatment's potential risks and patients'...

Dear Editor, Cutaneous metastases are a relatively rare skin condition, but when appear portrend unfavorable outcome of the disease. The most common skin metastases among women are those originating from breast carcinoma and melanoma. On the other side, melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck, lung, and colon carcinoma most commonly metastasize towards to the skin among men. The diagnosis of skin metastases often comes long after the primary cancer diagnosis (1,2). According to...

In this study, novel Benzimidazole-Hydrazone derivatives (5A-5J) were synthesized and evaluated for their in vitro anticancer activities against Panc-1, SK-MEL-30, HeLa, and BEAS-2B cell lines. WST-1 cytotoxicity assays revealed that compound 5A displayed notable potency in SK-MEL-30 cells (IC(50) = 23.25 ± 1.40 μM), whereas compound 5H exhibited significant cytotoxicity in Panc-1 cells (IC(50) = 27.6 ± 1.1 μM), with minimal effects on BEAS-2B cells (> 200 μM), suggesting a favorable in vitro...

Canine cutaneous mast cell tumor (cMCT) is one of the most common skin neoplasms in dogs, with lymph nodes representing the primary route of metastasis. Accurate sentinel lymph node (SLN) identification is therefore essential for staging and treatment planning. This study evaluated indirect lipiodol lymphography (IL) and intraoperative methylene blue (MB) mapping in 21 dogs, including 26 tumors and 38 excised lymph nodes, to assess SLN detection and its association with tumor characteristics and...

Finding an unexpected metastatic lesion in bone marrow biopsy (BMB) performed for a hematological indication can cause diagnostic issues. In a BMB performed in a patient with suspected acute leukemia evolved from a post-essential thrombocythemia myelofibrosis a group of atypical cells with E-cadherin expression was found. After careful morphological evaluation and further immunohistochemical staining, these cells were identified as a melanoma metastasis with E-cadherin expression. E-cadherin...

Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) is one of the most common non-melanoma skin cancers worldwide. Although surgery and adjuvant therapies are often effective, the treatment of high-risk or advanced lesions remains challenging due to recurrence, resistance, toxicity, and limited long-term control. Natural compounds have, therefore, gained interest as multi-target agents for cancer prevention and treatment. This systematic review aimed to evaluate the antitumoral activity of natural...

Polypoid melanomas are unusual, as are amelanotic ones. Similarly, polypoid melanomas are not usually acral or amelanotic. They can be challenging to diagnose clinically, as they may resemble acral lentiginous nevus, polypoid Spitz nevus, eccrine poroma, schwannoma, pyogenic granuloma, verrucous carcinoma, fibrosarcoma, basal cell carcinoma, and pyoderma gangrenosum. We delineate a 64-year-old woman with an acral amelanotic polypoid melanoma on her sole. It was successfully removed surgically...

Melanoma exhibits pronounced metabolic plasticity and mitochondrial dependency, contributing to therapeutic resistance and tumor progression. Targeting mitochondrial function therefore represents a promising anticancer strategy. 2-Aminoethyl dihydrogen phosphate (2-AEH(2)P), a bioactive phosphomonoester, has demonstrated antiproliferative potential, while metformin, a clinically established antidiabetic drug, acts as a mitochondrial complex I inhibitor and metabolic modulator. This study...

Transient receptor potential vanilloid 5 (TRPV5) is a calcium- and pH-sensitive ion channel. It plays a role in tumor biology and cellular calcium homeostasis. Due to the inverse pH gradient in solid tumors (extracellular acidosis and increased intracellular pH), TRPV5 is interesting as a signaling molecule in tumors, as the altered pH in the tumor microenvironment (TME) impacts tumor growth and metastasis. This is the first study to analyze the expression of TRPV5 in common skin cancers, i.e.,...

Hidrocystomas are benign cystic skin tumours of sweat gland origin which often involve the eyelids but are usually solitary. We report the case of a middle-aged man with multiple bilateral eyelid hidrocystomas, palmoplantar keratoderma, hypodontia and nail dystrophy, in keeping with a diagnosis of Schöpf-Schulz-Passarge syndrome, an exceedingly rare ectodermal dysplasia. Hyperprolactinaemia was found on testing, and radiology revealed an incidental prolactinoma. Raised serum prolactin has not...

The introduction of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) into the treatment of melanoma has significantly reduced mortality over the past decade. However, therapeutic benefit is not observed in all patients, and treatment may be associated with severe adverse events. Therefore, identifying patients who are most likely to benefit from immunotherapy remains of critical importance. Currently used biomarkers, such as programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression and manual assessment of...

Australia has one of the world's highest melanoma incidences among youth. Adolescents often under-prioritise sun protection due to sociocultural factors, for example, the perceived attractiveness of tanned skin and a sense of invulnerability. This study reports on a curriculum-integrated sun safety intervention implemented in a single independent girls' secondary school, a context that provides important insights but also limits generalisability to mixed-gender and other school settings. High...

Melanoma treatment has been transformed by immune checkpoint blockade, yet many patients still experience primary resistance, limited durability of response, or acquired resistance. These limitations underscore the need for additional targets that reflect melanoma biology while enabling new therapeutic strategies, particularly in biologically defined settings of immune escape such as checkpoint-resistant, HLA-low, dedifferentiated, or stress-adapted melanoma. The B7-H6/NKp30 axis has gained...

In this study, we evaluated the impact of different in vitro 3D culture modelling methods on the activity of doxorubicin (DOX) and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) in human melanoma spheroids. Human melanoma A375 and IGR39 spheroids were generated using the hanging drop and non-adhesive surface methods. Spheroid growth dynamics were assessed by measuring changes in spheroid diameter. To compare the effects of anticancer drugs in spheroids of different sizes, spheroids of approximately 200 and 400 µm were...

CONCLUSIONS: Pre-treatment NPAR levels may be an independent and potential predictor of survival in advanced melanoma patients receiving ICIs. This easily calculable ratio could provide a practical guide for risk stratification.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: These findings suggest that, while many pregnancies exposed to ICIs result in live births, there may be an increased risk of adverse maternal and fetal outcomes. However, causality cannot be established due to the limited quality and quantity of available data. These findings underscore the importance of effective contraception during ICI therapy and careful multidisciplinary counseling when exposure occurs during pregnancy.

In-transit melanoma represents a biologically aggressive form of locoregional disease in which effective management requires integration of local tumor control with systemic immune engagement. Although traditional regional therapies achieve high response rates, they have not consistently translated into durable systemic survival. This review evaluates the clinical development and mechanistic rationale of intralesional therapies, including cytokine-based approaches, oncolytic viruses,...

Background/Objectives: Intestinal malignant melanoma is a rare entity, most commonly presenting as metastatic disease from a cutaneous primary source. The distinction between primary and secondary intestinal melanoma remains challenging, yet it has important diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic implications. This study aims to highlight the diagnostic difficulties and therapeutic considerations associated with intestinal melanoma. Methods: A narrative literature review was conducted using the...

Malignant Melanoma is the fourth most common cancer in Ireland, known for rapid progression and metastasis. Targeted immunotherapy has significantly improved 5-year survival. In May 2024, the National Cancer Control Programme issued guidelines for radiological staging and surveillance, helping clinicians in determining the appropriate radiological modality and timeline for staging and surveillance. This audit revealed gaps in follow-up imaging due to organizational constraints and health service...

Intratumoral therapies provide an opportunity for novel strategies in the management of advanced melanoma. These approaches deliver concentrated doses of therapeutic immune agents directly into individual tumor(s), achieving local tumor control and induction of systemic antitumor immune responses while minimizing the risk of immune-related adverse events. Talimogene laherparepvec, a genetically modified herpes simplex virus type 1-encoding granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, was...

CONCLUSION: Efficacy with ICI after TIL was limited, with no evidence of synergistic toxicity. As TIL therapy becomes more widely available, these data highlight the need for novel therapies in this setting and support the inclusion of this population in future clinical trials.

CONCLUSIONS: These results provide new insights into advanced MF tumorigenesis and show that the effects of IL4Rα blockade are specific to the STAT6 pathway, inhibiting proliferation of malignant lymphocytes, as well as repressing several immunosuppressive mechanisms within the MF TME. However, the extensive genetic, transcriptional, and functional heterogeneity across MF patients indicates that inhibition of multiple driver pathways and a personalized therapeutic approach will be important for...

CONCLUSION: Children with cutaneous mastocytosis frequently exhibit sleep disturbances, whereas the impact on dermatology-related QoL was generally mild in most patients. Notably, sleep problems were highly prevalent even when dermatology-related QoL impact was minimal, indicating that dermatology-specific QoL instruments may not fully capture the sleep-related burden of pediatric cutaneous mastocytosis. These findings support the integration of routine sleep and dermatology-related QoL...

Melanoma is a highly aggressive and metabolically adaptable cancer that often resists conventional therapies. Targeting core bioenergetic pathways may, therefore, represent an effective strategy to improve therapeutic responses, particularly in tumors dependent on mitochondrial function. SC18 is an imidazolidine-2,4-dione compound that binds the NADH-binding pocket of voltage-dependent anion channels (VDACs), inducing mitochondrial dysfunction. VDAC expression is increased in melanoma and...

Identifying safe and effective targets remains a major bottleneck for CAR T cell therapies. In this issue of Cell, Baker and colleagues developed a large language model (LLM)-assisted scoring framework to streamline this process and as a result identified and validated glycoprotein non-metastatic melanoma protein B (GPNMB) as a candidate chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T target across melanoma, leukemia, and colorectal cancer.

Enhancing innate-adaptive immune crosstalk is key for improving cancer vaccine efficacy. TRIMELVax is a heat shock-conditioned whole-tumor-cell vaccine combining xenogeneic melanoma cell lysate, syngeneic B16F10 melanoma cell lysate, and Concholepas concholepas hemocyanin. Although TRIMELVax elicits robust antitumor responses in preclinical models, the mechanisms underlying its efficacy remain poorly defined. We characterized the early immune events triggered by TRIMELVax in mice using RT-qPCR,...

CONCLUSIONS: In this multicenter cohort, adjuvant chemotherapy did not demonstrate a uniform survival benefit overall but was associated with improved outcomes in head and neck MCC, suggesting a potential site-specific effect. Similar outcomes across stage III subgroups suggest that chemotherapy may mitigate stage-related prognostic differences. These findings support a selective approach to adjuvant chemotherapy and highlight the need for prospective studies incorporating modern immunotherapy...

CONCLUSIONS: Within future therapeutic frameworks, melanoma vaccines are envisioned to play a key role by inducing and amplifying a targeted T-cell response against cancer. This approach is particularly suited for combination with other immunotherapies that neutralize the resistance mechanisms found in the tumor microenvironment.

CONCLUSIONS: The CD4/TGF‑β bispecific antibody shows significant antitumor efficacy and good safety in the mouse model of peritoneal metastasis of melanoma.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells have demonstrated curative potential in hematologic cancers and increasing efficacy in solid tumors and non-malignant diseases. However, target identification remains a major bottleneck. We developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven approach for CAR T cell target discovery by integrating single-cell RNA sequencing datasets from human skin cancer and healthy tissue. Candidates were refined using public datasets to optimize for tumor composition,...

The 2025 Cure Ocular Melanoma (CURE OM) Global Science Meeting took place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on October 25th, 2025. Several promising drug candidates are in development; however, there is still an urgent need for better prevention, detection, and treatment of uveal melanoma. The purpose of this meeting was to promote international collaboration and idea exchange between scientists, industry, and patient advocates.

CONCLUSIONS: Tagraxofusp demonstrates consistent remission-inducing activity in adults with BPDCN across prospective and real-world settings. Long-term survival appears strongly influenced by successful bridging to HSCT. Evidence remains predominantly non-randomized, underscoring the need for comparative and combination studies.

CONCLUSION: Liposomes containing CAPE and vitamin D in a 1:1 molar ratio were more effective in inducing A375, B16F10 and HDF-1 cells death compared to their free mixture.

Gamma delta (γδ) T cells are critical for tissue immune surveillance and their presence in tumors correlates with a favorable prognosis, highlighting their therapeutic potential. Although γδ T cells are abundant in the skin, their therapeutic value in skin cancer has remained largely unexplored due to challenges in isolating sufficient numbers of γδ T cells from human tissues and a lack of suitable preclinical models for skin cancer. Here, we are using innovative methods to expand human...

CONCLUSION: Dermoscopy use is associated with higher overall skin lesion assessment confidence. Wider adoption, especially outside dermatology, requires training, increased advocacy, and expanded education.

Objective: To investigate the anti-tumor effect of knockdown of telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) in melanoma and its potential clinical value. Methods: Employed TERT knockdown strategy and evaluated the expression of target gene by Western blot analysis and RT-qPCR. The in vitro effects of TERT knockdown strategy were evaluated by cell proliferation, apoptosis, migration and invasion assays in A375 cells line, and the in vivo effects were evaluated via a xenografts mouse tumor model....

ObjectiveSkin cancer diagnosis via automated image analysis remains a challenging task due to poor image contrast, visual similarity among lesion classes, and class imbalance in available datasets. To address these issues, this study proposes a novel Tri Model Dermatology Cancer Neural Network (TriDermCancerNet) for classifying skin cancer from dermoscopic images.MethodsTwo publicly available datasets are used in this work: the International Skin Imaging Collaboration 2018 and 2019 datasets,...

Acral melanoma (AM) is the most common subtype of melanoma in non-Caucasian populations, typically arising in weight-bearing areas of the sole. Currently, the majority of patients lack effective targeted therapeutic drugs. V-crk avian sarcoma virus CT10 oncogene homolog-like (CRKL), an adaptor protein, plays a pivotal role in the tumorigenesis and progression of various cancers. However, its function in the development of plantar acral melanoma remains unclear. In this study, clinical data and...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) produced by melanoma cells (MTEX) carry ecto-nucleotidases, CD39/CD73, on their surface membrane, produce adenosine (ADO), and deliver it to immune recipient cells, inducing immune suppression. Based on studies of MTEX from melanoma cell lines, we hypothesized that MTEX are the major producers of ADO in cancer patients' plasma, which contains a variable mix of MTEX and NTEX. To test this hypothesis, EVs were isolated from the plasma of melanoma patients with no...

Excessive melanin production contributes to hyperpigmentation disorders, highlighting the need for safer, mechanism-based depigmenting agents. This study investigated the anti-melanogenic effects of Resolvin D5 (RVD5) in α-MSH-stimulated B16F10 melanoma cells. RVD5 significantly reduced extracellular and intracellular melanin levels without compromising cell viability or cell number. Mechanistically, RVD5 suppressed tyrosinase expression and activity, accompanied by downregulation of MITF and...

Wide local excision of primary cutaneous melanoma is usually performed in 2 stages: diagnostic excision followed by definitive surgery with margins based on histopathological Breslow thickness. High-frequency ultrasound may enable reasonably accurate preoperative thickness estimation and may allow a single-stage approach. However, its adoption in routine practice remains limited. This study evaluated dermatologists' acceptance of ultrasound-guided 1-step melanoma surgery and explored barriers to...

Establishing reproducible murine tumor models is essential for evaluating cancer biology and immunotherapy strategies. Intratumoral immunotherapy treats established tumors with immune-stimulating reagents to reverse local immune suppression and stimulate systemic antitumor immunity. Most cancer studies in mice establish the tumors in the subcutaneous space, which has inherent challenges for experimental intratumoral immunotherapy due to the inability to visualize intratumoral injections....