Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0027960 (mole)
 21,279 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The microcirculation of primary uveal melanomas, their precursors, and their metastases is distinctive. Medium-sized and even large primary uveal melanomas typically lack significant zones of necrosis, suggesting that either these tumors are relatively well perfused or they are capable of growth in a severely blood-deprived microenvironment. In addition to normal choroidal vessels that are incorporated into nevi and most primary uveal melanomas, aggressive primary and metastatic uveal melanomas tend to contain patterns of extracellular matrix that surround spheroidal or cylindrical packets of tumor cells. Some components of this branching, looping, and interconnected system of matrix may be perfused. It is now known that the generation of this patterning is a characteristic of genetically dysregulated melanoma cells (nonaggressive tumor cells do not form these patterns and melanomas lacking branching, looping, or interconnected matrix patterns tend to follow a relatively indolent course). We developed an orthotopic model of an aggressive human uveal melanoma by injecting suspensions of the primary human choroidal melanoma cell line (OCM1) into the subretinal space of one eye of 20 SCID mice. All mice were examined daily for tumor growth and tumors developed in every eye within 3 weeks of injection. The tumors were characterized by extraocular extension and the development of looping matrix patterns characteristic of those seen in aggressive human uveal melanoma. As in human uveal melanomas, these patterns were perfused by blood in areas. The orthotopic injection of human uveal melanoma cells into the SCID mouse eye generates a model reproducing the matrix-associated microcirculatory patterns of aggressive primary human uveal melanomas. This model can be used to explore the molecular pathogenesis and modulation of this novel circulation in vivo, to facilitate our understanding of the blood flow to these tumors providing insight into perfusion and drug delivery, to enable testing of pharmacologic modulation of pattern formation and intratumoral blood flow, and to refine noninvasive methods such as confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscopy to detect the presence of these patterns by which ophthalmologists might assess the biological behavior of tumors as noninvasive substitute for biopsy.
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PMID:An orthotopic model for human uveal melanoma in SCID mice. 1220 44

Uveal melanoma (UM) is one of the most common primary intraocular malignant tumors in adults. Melanoma antigen recognized by T cell-1 (Mart-1), one of the melanosome-specific proteins, has been widely studied as a marker recognized by cytotoxicity T lymphocytes. Mart-1 is considered to play a critical role in the immunotherapy for melanoma. Additionally, as a biomarker, Mart-1 is often used with other tumor-associated antigens for antidiastole in cutaneous melanoma (CM), uveal melanoma (UM) and nevus. In this study, the differential expression of Mart-1 was investigated in four human UM cells (SP6.5, VUP, OCM-1 and OM431) on three levels of analysis: messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), protein and, eventually, morphology. The results revealed that SP6.5 cells had high Mart-1 protein expression while VUP cells had almost none. OCM-1 and OM431 cells produced less Mart-1 than SP6.5 cells according to Western blot analysis, although OM431 cells had the highest expression of Mart-1 mRNA according to real-time PCR. The results indicate the potential use of Mart-1 in the development of therapy for UM.
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PMID:Differential expression of Mart-1 in human uveal melanoma cells. 2166 26