Uveal Melanoma Discovery Points to New Treatment Possibilities
November 16, 2021
A team co-led by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine has revealed in detail how the most common primary eye cancer in adults, uveal melanoma (UM), can progress from a slow-growing, “indolent” state to a lethal metastasizing state. The discovery is a significant advance in fundamental cancer research that also suggests new strategies for treatment.
The scientists, whose study is published Sept. 13 in Nature Communications, examined thousands of individual UM cells from patients, using advanced methods to record and analyze gene activity in each cell. They showed that these melanomas move toward a metastatic state when they lose the function of a molecular machine in cells called Polycomb Repressive Complex 1 (PRC1). This multi-protein machine normally works in the cell nucleus as an important “epigenetic” controller of DNA folding and gene activity. The scientists detailed how PRC1’s loss leads to aberrant gene activity and errors in chromosome segregation during cell division, thereby enhancing the metastatic potential of tumors.