Transcription profiling of human cutaneous tumors to identify gene expression patterns involved in the malignant transformation and progression of metastatic melanoma

Metastatic melanoma is a deadly disease while non-metastatic melanoma and other cutaneous tumor types are usually cured with surgical removal of the primary tumors. This study evaluated gene expresion to determine if gene expression differences existed which would allow one to identify the metastatic tumors based on the expression of specific genes. Experiment Overall Design: Tumor samples were collected from patients with various cutaneous tumors, flash frozen, and then processed for gene exprression analysis using microarrays. The pool of tissues includes enough metastatic samples and non-metastatic samples to identify a gene expression signature associated with the outgrowth of the metastatic tumor.