Cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM) is the most aggressive type of skin cancer and has the highest metastatic rate across all cancers. It is the fifth most common cancer among men and the sixth most common cancer among women. CMM has higher mortality, incidence, recurrence, and metastatic rate amongst men compared to women. Aiming at deciphering the differences between females and males, this project used three gene expression datasets of stage I-III primary melanomas with complete follow-up information available, one of them including a total of 386 females and 319 males. Interestingly, most of the genes found to be significantly associated with patients’ survival based on the Cox regression analysis on the complete cohorts showed a great difference in survival association when the cohorts were stratified by sex. Also, survival analysis carried out in females yielded a much higher number of genes with low adjusted Cox regression p-value than in males and very few prognostic genes in the male population were as significant as in females. Interestingly, X-chromosome inactivation escape genes had a significant protective role in overall survival in females while no significant relation was found in males. The identified biomarkers that participate in the difference of survival in the two sexes, will further be verified on an independent dataset available at our institution. One of the projects’ overall aims is to shed light on the understudied field of sexual dimorphism in cancer. The final goal is to translate sex specific biomarkers to the clinic, in order to personalise patient follow-up and improve prevention of melanoma recurrence.

ESDRLB009 - Analysis of sex related biomarkers for early detection of primary melanoma recurrence

50th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Dermatological Research. VIRTUAL MEETING