Correlation of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor subtypes and their receptors with melanoma progression: A next-generation Tissue Microarray (ngTMA) automated analysis

IntroductionFinding new markers to assess prognosis of melanoma without the necessity to perform a surgical interventions is an important goal in melanoma research. The current study aimed to assess the correlation of clinical course and prognosis of primary and metastatic melanoma with expression of VEGF family and their receptors.MethodsA ngTMA block was made from the randomly selected paraffin tissue blocks of the patients with melanocytic nevi, primary and metastatic melanoma. Then sections cut from ngTMA-block were immunohistochemically stained with proper antibodies. Expression of these proteins was investigated using automated image analysis and compared among the study groups.ResultsWe analyzed the tissue of 238 patients with following diagnoses: 101 (42.4%) with a diagnosis of nevus, 86 (36.1%) Malignant melanoma and 51 (21.4%) metastasis. Median follow-up time for the malignant lesions was 5.71 years. Among the tested antigen, VEGF-C (p = 0.016), VEGF-R2 (pConclusionsThis study shows that VEGF-C and VEGF-R2 might represent new prognostic marker in MM. However, further prospective studies are warranted to test their real efficacy as a prognostic marker.