There is continued interest in markers indicative of circulating melanoma cells. Nestin is a neuroepithelial intermediate filament protein that was found to be expressed in melanoma and in various cancer stem cells.

We investigated expression of nestin in peripheral blood of melanoma patients.

We analyzed nestin expression by flow cytometry and by quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT−PCR) both in tissues (n=23) and blood samples (n=102) from patients with AJCC stage III−IV melanoma. Forty−six negative controls were also added.

Flow cytometry did not reveal nestin expressing cells in peripheral blood of healthy volunteers. In melanoma patients, however, nestin protein was expressed in a proportion of melanoma cells enriched from peripheral blood by immunomagnetic sorting. In melanoma tissue samples a significant correlation was found between mRNAs encoding for nestin and tyrosinase (p=0.001) and Mart−1 (p=0.002), whereas in blood a significant correlation was only observed for tyrosinase (p=0.015), but not for Mart−1 (p=0.53). Nestin expression was higher in stage IV patients compared to stage III/IV with no evidence of disease (NED), positively correlated to tumour burden, and positively correlated to expression of tyrosinase and Mart−1.

Nestin showed to be an additional marker of interest for circulating melanoma cells. Prospective studies have to investigate a potential added informative value in comparison to markers already in use for melanoma cell detection.

PMID: 20105170 [PubMed − as supplied by publisher] Source: National Library of Medicine.