Plenary Speaker: Large Scale Melanoma Cancer Studies at the European Cancer Moonshot Lund Center in Partnership with Five International Clinical Hospitals

Melanoma of the skin is the sixth most common type of cancer in Europe and accounts for 3.4% of all diagnosed cancers. More alarming is the increase of highly aggressive forms of skin cancer and metastases spread, and the degree of recurrence that occurs with approximately 20% of patients lethally relapsing following treatment. Targeted oncotherapy is one of the standard treatment for progressive stage 3 and 4 melanoma, and, e.g; vemurafenib, dabrafenib, encorafenib combined with MEK inhibitor, e.g: trametinib, cobimetinib, bibimetinib) can effectively counter BRAFV600E-mutated melanomas. We verify our current knowledge of the Melanoma disease mechanisms that regulates the functional divergence in cancer development on a molecular level along the axis of gene expression, with an emphasis on the tumor proteome. We establish a basis for the interdependence in-between different molecular expressions and how Melanoma progression links to functional diversity. Somatic mutations have been extensively characterized in malignant melanoma. Here we describe quantitative mass-spectrometry-based proteomic study interfaced to extensive and detailed pathological tumor characterization, associated with clinical meta-data, for the analysis of 500 annotated malignant melanoma tumor samples. We demonstrate that ProteoGenomic analysis of malignant melanoma cancer elucidates the functional consequences of somatic mutations, narrows candidate nominations for driver and passenger proteins, and identifies therapeutic candidate targets.