Characterization of Primary Melanomas Using High-Resolution Array Based CGH Technology

Malignant melanoma is an aggressive heterogeneous disease for which new biomarkers for diagnosis and clinical outcome are needed. We investigated by array-CGH the presence of DNA gains and losses to provide better genomic profile of primary malignant melanoma and to explore the possibility to distinguish metastatic from non metastatic melanomas using this technology. High resolution array-CGH (Agilent Technologies, Palo Alto, CA), with more than 40.000 probes, has been used to analyze 20 frozen tissues of vertical growth phase primary melanoma with a minimum follow-up time of 36 months. Eight patients developed nodal metastatic disease and twelve did not. For results validation, 83 additional melanoma samples with similar clinical characteristics were analysed by FISH. DNA copy number aberrations (CNA) were observed in 19 out of 20 cases. The most frequent changes were complete or partial losses in chromosomes 9 (12 cases, 60%) and 10 (9 cases, 45%), partial gains or trisomies of chromosome 7 (10 cases, 50%); and monosomy of chromosome 19 (7 cases, 35%). Sixty-four recurrent aberrant regions (SORIs) were precisely delimited and used as variables for clustering. Unsupervised Cluster analysis allowed the segregation of samples into two genomic groups that naturally fitted with the metastatic condition of the cases. Four of these aberrant regions were chosen for their biological interest and were confirmed as aberrant using FISH technique on fixed paraffin embedded tissues. Conclusion: Supervised classification allowed obtaining aberrations useful to separate samples with different clinical outcome. Obtained results are useful to improve the knowledge about melanoma tumorigenesis but unfortunately cannot be used as a marker for metastatic progression. Keywords: Comparative Genomic Hybridization - array; Genomic Instability Comparative experiment: pheripheral blood pool of ten healthy female donors: CONTROL vs. 20 Primary Vertigal Growth Phase Melanoma samples.