| description |
An incomplete view of the (epi)genetic events that drive melanoma initiation and progression has been a major barrier to rational development of effective therapeutics and prognostic diagnostics for melanoma patients. Recent approaches that integrate human melanoma genomic and transcriptomic data provide unprecedented opportunities to discover oncogenic melanoma drivers. One limitation, however, is that human melanoma genome exhibits a radically altered cytogenetic profile. Hence there is a need for biologically-meaningful approaches to identify and validate lesions that drive melanomagenesis. We combined comparative oncogenomic approaches with mouse modeling to identify new cancer genes/pathways that drive melanoma progression. Spontaneously acquired genetic alterations such as copy-number alterations and specific mutations in mouse tumors of defined genetic origin were identified and used to prioritize relevant lesions from the complex human melanoma genomes. This integrated effort confirmed the importance of several genes and pathways previously implicated in melanoma and identified new putative melanoma tumor suppressor genes. Genetic ablation of one such gene, Fes, cooperated with BRafv600E to accelerate melanomagenesis in mice. This comparative oncogenomic approach has therefore helped discover a series of novel melanoma tumor suppressor genes, including FES, with prognostic and therapeutic relevance in human melanoma. |