As melanoma comes into greater focus, an international team of investigators, including Dr. Hector Peinado from Weill Cornell Medical College, hope its new research will make significant headway in combating the metastatic, and often fatal, form of the disease.
Dr. Peinado, assistant professor of molecular biology in pediatrics, will serve as the Young Investigator for the team, which includes researchers from Spain, Switzerland, France and Germany. Dr. Peinado seeks to develop tests and tracers that, in real time, monitor the spread of a patient's melanoma to other organs in his or her body.
This investigation will be made possible by a $900,000, three-year grant from the Melanoma Research Alliance, the largest private funder of melanoma research. The alliance, a public charity formed in 2007 under the auspices of the Milken Institute, awarded more than $9.6 million this spring for 20 research studies that investigate new treatments and cures for melanoma.
Dr. Peinado's grant will fund efforts to produce molecular tools and validate new compounds that block the formation of lymphatic vessels, one of the main routes that cancer cells use to conquer new organs and generate metastasis. Using new technology and mouse models, researchers hope they will be able to see the early stages of lymphangiogenesis, the process by which lymphatic vessels form, before the cancer colonizes other organs.
By doing so, they aim to develop methods that will enable physicians to catch early melanoma metastasis and ultimately block the cancer's spread, with the long-term goal of producing new diagnostic and prognostic indicators, tools for pharmacological screening and more efficient anti-cancer treatments.
Working with his mentor, Dr. David Lyden, the Stavros S. Niarchos Professor in Pediatric Cardiology, professor of pediatrics and professor of cell and developmental biology, Dr. Peinado will determine the role of tumor secreted vesicles, called exosomes, in melanoma metastasis and lymphangiogenesis.
Tumor secreted exosomes can be found in the blood stream of melanoma patients, and Dr. Peinado will endeavor to distinguish specific markers in these circulating exosomes with the goal of identifying effective targets and therapeutic agents to block melanoma metastasis and lymhangiogenesis. He will also determine the use of circulating exosomes to predict response to therapy in ongoing clinical trials with anti-cancer drugs in melanoma patients.
"With these studies, we may be able to monitor early metastasis and lymphangiogensis in real time and predict melanoma progression and response to therapy," Dr. Peinado said. "My studies at Weill Cornell Medical College specifically may identify novel markers in exosomes of melanoma patients that could predict disease progression and response to therapy and thus allow better patient stratification through a simple blood test. Importantly, these studies may eventually lead to the design of future targeted therapies to block lymphangiogenesis and metastasis."