Background: The accurate clinical assessment of melanocytic neoplasms is a challenge for clinicians. Currently, obtaining a biopsy specimen and conducting a histologic examination is the standard of care. The incidence of melanoma in white populations is high, resulting in a large number of biopsy specimens.
Objective: The objective of this study is to develop a noninvasive genomic method using mRNA to classify pigmented skin lesions as either benign or malignant.
Methods: An adhesive patch method was used to obtain cells from the surface of melanocytic lesions. mRNA was extracted and a genomic signature was formulated in a training set of benign and malignant melanocytic neoplasms and subsequently tested in a validation set.
Results: A 2-gene signature assessing the expression levels of CMIP and LINC00518 was able to differentiate melanomas from nevi in an independent validation set of 42 melanomas and 22 nevi with a sensitivity of 97.6% and specificity of 72.7%.
Limitations: Larger and more diverse sets of melanomas and nevi are needed for additional validation of the molecular expression profiling in various subsets of melanocytic neoplasms.
Conclusion: Our data suggest that mRNA molecular signatures can serve as a highly useful noninvasive method of differentiating melanoma from nevi and decrease the number of unnecessary biopsies.
Keywords: dysplastic nevi; melanocytic neoplasms; melanoma; molecular signatures; nevi.
Copyright © 2014 American Academy of Dermatology, Inc. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.