Increased gene expression levels of collagen receptor integrins are associated with decreased survival parameters in patients with advanced melanoma.

Expression of collagen receptor integrins alpha1beta1 and alpha2beta1 has been associated with progression and metastatic potential of malignant melanoma. Integrin alpha2beta1 was originally characterized as a melanoma progression antigen. We have used real-time quantitative PCR to study the mRNA expression levels of three collagen receptor integrin chains, that is alpha1, alpha2 and alpha11 in metastases from 26 patients with melanoma. Interestingly, we find that survival after initiation of chemoimmunotherapy was significantly decreased in all patients whose tumours expressed high mRNA levels of alpha1 integrin, alpha2 integrin or alpha11 integrin when compared with lower tumour expression levels (P<0.05, log rank test). Moreover, those patients with high mRNA levels of all studied integrins had a significantly shorter survival from the appearance of the first metastasis than the patients with low levels of integrins (P<0.05). Furthermore, a high mRNA expression level of integrin alpha2 was found to be associated with poorer overall survival. High alpha2 mRNA levels (n=6) were associated with median survival of 35 months and low alpha2 mRNA levels (n=20), with median survival of 53 months (P=0.033). We conclude that collagen receptor integrins are important in the progression and prognosis of metastatic melanoma, and their measurements might be used as predictive markers when assessing disease progression.