Abstract

Background: once metastasized, despite a variety of therapeutic options, the prognosis of patients with malignant melanoma (MM) is still poor. Therefore, the search for reliable markers to identify patients with high risk of disease progression is of high clinical im-portance. we have recently shown that TT genotypes of the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) T393C in the gene GNAS1 are significantly associated with better outcome in a variety of carcinomas. Patients: In the present study we assessed whether the T393C SNP is also related to the clinical course in MM. 328 patients with MM were retrospectively geno-typed and genotypes were correlated with clinical out-come. Results: while the allele frequency in the MM group (fC 0.52) did not significantly differ from that of healthy blood donors, the T393C SNP was associated with tumor progression of MM. Carriers of the C-al-lele showed a significantly more severe tumor progres-sion as estimated from the time period to develop metastasis (HR 2.2, 95 % CI 1.1-3.2, p = 0.017). Pro-portions of 5-year metastasis-free intervals were 87.1 % for TT genotypes and 66.0 % for C-allele carri-ers. Moreover, multivariable Cox regression analysis including tumor stage and melanoma subtype proved the T393C polymorphism to be an independent factor for metastasis (p = 0.012). Conclusions: In summary, the GNAS1 T393C SNP represents a genetic host factor for predicting tumor progression also in patients with MM; genotyping of this SNP may contribute to better define patients who could benefit from an early individualized therapy