1. Malignant Melanoma: An Overview, New Perspectives, and Vitamin D Signaling.
- Author
-
Slominski, Radomir M., Kim, Tae-Kang, Janjetovic, Zorica, Brożyna, Anna A., Podgorska, Ewa, Dixon, Katie M., Mason, Rebecca S., Tuckey, Robert C., Sharma, Rahul, Crossman, David K., Elmets, Craig, Raman, Chander, Jetten, Anton M., Indra, Arup K., and Slominski, Andrzej T.
- Subjects
- *
MELANOMA treatment , *VITAMIN D metabolism , *RISK assessment , *MELANOMA , *ATTITUDES toward illness , *CANCER invasiveness , *MELANOGENESIS , *ARTIFICIAL intelligence , *CELLULAR signal transduction , *BIOINFORMATICS , *METASTASIS , *METABOLITES , *MOLECULAR biology , *CELL receptors , *DISEASE risk factors - Abstract
Simple Summary: Despite recent advances in diagnosis and therapy, malignant melanoma poses a significant problem both to clinicians and cancer researchers due to its resistance to therapy and unpredictable behavior. In this review, we discuss etiology, risk factors, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy of melanoma, with a focus on new developments in these areas including bioinformatics. These are analyzed in the context of its unique metabolic characteristics and of recent advances in vitamin D biology with implications for melanoma. Active forms of vitamin D can prevent or inhibit melanoma development and progression, and can be used in therapy of this disease. Knowledge of patient vitamin D status and vitamin D signaling in the tumoral tissue can help in predicting the progression of the disease and in primary or adjuvant therapy. Therefore, vitamin D signaling represents a realistic target for the prevention or therapy of malignant melanoma. Melanoma, originating through malignant transformation of melanin-producing melanocytes, is a formidable malignancy, characterized by local invasiveness, recurrence, early metastasis, resistance to therapy, and a high mortality rate. This review discusses etiologic and risk factors for melanoma, diagnostic and prognostic tools, including recent advances in molecular biology, omics, and bioinformatics, and provides an overview of its therapy. Since the incidence of melanoma is rising and mortality remains unacceptably high, we discuss its inherent properties, including melanogenesis, that make this disease resilient to treatment and propose to use AI to solve the above complex and multidimensional problems. We provide an overview on vitamin D and its anticancerogenic properties, and report recent advances in this field that can provide solutions for the prevention and/or therapy of melanoma. Experimental papers and clinicopathological studies on the role of vitamin D status and signaling pathways initiated by its active metabolites in melanoma prognosis and therapy are reviewed. We conclude that vitamin D signaling, defined by specific nuclear receptors and selective activation by specific vitamin D hydroxyderivatives, can provide a benefit for new or existing therapeutic approaches. We propose to target vitamin D signaling with the use of computational biology and AI tools to provide a solution to the melanoma problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF