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 the journal 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.