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Research Paper
Analysis of Cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) Expression During Malignant Melanoma Progression
Anne-Christine Goulet, Janine G. Einsphar, David S. Alberts, Anthony Beas, Cynthia Burk, Achyut Bhattacharyya, Jerry Bangert, Janet M. Harmon, Hideji Fujiwara, Alane Koki and Mark A. Nelson
volume 2 | issue 6
nov/dec 2003Pages: 713-718
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Cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) is an inducible enzyme involved in the production of prostaglandins and thromboxanes during inflammation. There are now several lines of evidence indicating that increased expression of COX-2 plays a functional role in the development and progression of malignant epithelial cancers. However, there is only limited data regarding the role of COX-2 in melanoma pathogenesis. In the present work, we retrospectively examined lesions through out the development of melanoma and metastatic disease (dysplastic nevi n = 10, melanoma in situ n = 4, stage II melanoma n = 10, stage III n = 4, stage IV n = 3, stage V n = 2, melanoma metastasis lymph nodes n = 13 metastasis to other sites n = 3). COX-2 was consistently observed in keratinocytes, dermal fibroblasts, and inflammatory cells in regions adjacent to benign nevi and primary cutaneous melanomas. However, no COX-2 staining was detected in the nevi nor in the primary skin melanoma cells. In addition, COX-2 was undetected in all vertical and radial growth phase cases. Interestingly, 13 out of 13 of the lymph node metastasis expressed extremely high levels of COX-2 in overlying epithelium and inflammatory cells, and COX-2 was strongly detected in the metastatic cancer cells per se. For additional information on the expression of COX-2 in malignant melanoma, we determined the expression of COX-2 protein in several different melanoma cell lines. We found that 3 out of 7 of the melanoma cells over expressed COX-2 compared to normal melanocytes. Collectively, these data suggest that COX-2 may play a functional role in metastases of melanoma, and treatment with COX-2 inhibitors may be efficacious for malignant melanoma.
We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:
Download PDFIf the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.