Mount Sinai’s High-Resolution Imaging Allows Researchers to Identify How an Aggressive Skin Cancer Metastasizes
Researchers at The Tisch Cancer Institute of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai collaborated with scientists in Spain to show the mechanisms that cutaneous melanoma, the most aggressive type of skin cancer, activates early on to spark metastasis, according to a study published in Nature. The discovery could lead to early detection of particularly aggressive melanomas, as well as offer a potential target for melanoma treatment.
In this study, an international team led by the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) used a new mouse model, called “MetAlert,” in which mice emit light through bioluminescence when cancer causes a pathogenic activation of lymphatic vessels. Through highly sophisticated high-resolution intravital microscopy carried out at Mount Sinai, researchers detected the mechanisms that melanomas activate very early on to create their own pathways of dissemination, in part through the lymph vessels.
High-resolution intravital microscopy of lymph node metastasis to visualize lymphatic dissemination in real time was performed in The Intravital Core in the Microscopy Core at Mount Sinai led by Javier Bravo-Cordero, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology at the Icahn School of Medicine. Intravital microscopy is a live and real-time imaging technology that allows researchers to visualize the process of metastasis at the single cell level in affected organs, such as the lymph nodes.
“Intravital imaging technology is opening up new avenues in metastatis research. It allows us to study the process of metastasis at cellular resolution in a living animal,” said Dr. Bravo-Cordero. “These metastasis-visualization techniques are very powerful since they can be adapted to various types of cancer, not only to melanoma, in order to answer fundamental questions in cancer metastasis.”
Mount Sinai’s intravital imaging technology also corroborated CNIO researchers’ finding that a protein called MIDKINE increased the risk of metastasis, making MIDKINE a potential target for therapies and an indicator of how aggressive a patient’s melanoma might be.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the nation’s leading integrated academic health systems and one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area. Its comprehensive system includes seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, over 600 research and clinical laboratories, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing. Together, the Health System comprises approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses.
As a leading learning health system, Mount Sinai combines clinical expertise with scientific discovery to improve patient care while training the next generation of health care and biomedical leaders. The Health System provides care across every stage of life, from prenatal care through geriatrics, while advancing personalized medicine through artificial intelligence, data science, and biomedical research.
Mount Sinai is consistently recognized among the nation’s leading academic health systems for patient care, research, and education. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 1 in New York by Newsweek and No. 5 on the magazine’s World’s Best Hospitals list. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ranks No. 11 among U.S. medical schools and No. 1 among freestanding medical schools for National Institutes of Health funding, reflecting the strength of its scientific enterprise and leadership in biomedical research.