Publications by authors named "M El Fane"
Article Synopsis
- Advancing age makes it harder for people to fight skin melanoma, a type of skin cancer.
- Scientists found that tiny particles called extracellular vesicles (EVs) from older cells change in content, even though they look the same as those from younger cells.
- A special protein called CD9 decreases as we age, which affects how these EVs can help tumors grow, making older cells better at supporting cancer.
Article Synopsis
- Cutaneous melanoma shows a notable sex disparity in how often it occurs and affects different genders, particularly worsening with age, but the reasons behind this are not fully understood.* -
- The study reveals that skin fibroblasts from older males experience changes that lead to increased melanoma cell invasiveness and resistance to treatment, impacting the behavior of tumors in older male mice.* -
- A specific protein, BMP2, is linked to the more aggressive characteristics of melanoma cells in aged males, and blocking its action can make these cancer cells more responsive to certain treatments.*
Metastatic melanoma is among the most enigmatic advanced cancers to clinically manage despite immense progress in the way of available therapeutic options and historic decreases in the melanoma mortality rate. Most patients with metastatic melanoma treated with modern targeted therapies (for example, BRAFV600E/K inhibitors) and/or immune checkpoint blockade (for example, anti-programmed death 1 therapy) will progress, owing to profound tumor cell plasticity fueled by genetic and nongenetic mechanisms and dichotomous host microenvironmental influences. Here we discuss the determinants of tumor heterogeneity, mechanisms of therapy resistance and effective therapy regimens that hold curative promise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Aged patients with melanoma (>65 years old) have more aggressive disease relative to young patients (<55 years old) for reasons that are not completely understood. Analysis of the young and aged secretome from human dermal fibroblasts identified >5-fold levels of IGF-binding protein 2 (IGFBP2) in the aged fibroblast secretome. IGFBP2 functionally triggers upregulation of the PI3K-dependent fatty acid biosynthesis program in melanoma cells.
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