Legal and ethical restrictions are limited to the stages before and after hatching. Transplants are not rejected, because the immune system has not yet developed. The embryo in the egg is easily accessible. The chick embryo as experimental system has several advantages. Although of eminent importance for the testing of novel drugs targeting pathways involved in melanoma cell proliferation or to induce an immune reaction directed against such experimentally generated melanomas, the mouse models seem limited to this application range. Hgf-Cdk4(R24C) mice ) or as a model for subcutaneous tumor nodule formation. Various genetically modified mouse models are used in melanoma research to study melanomas generation and progression (e.g. The initiation process of cellular invasion in melanoma might be a common feature in all melanomas via up-regulation of early embryonic genes such as Notch1 and nodal, or via up-regulation of neural crest signaling. The current lack of drugs specifically inhibiting melanoma cell migration is in part due to the lack of suitable in vivo models able to mimic the complex 3D-in vivo situation that melanoma cells have to cope with in the patient.
Melanoma cells can perform a “phenotype switching” from a proliferating to a migrating state and vice versa. BRAF V600E mutation ) available only for a subpopulation of melanomas. Ĭonsidering the crucial importance of cellular migration (leading to metastasis) for patient survival, it seems odd that in the past decades, therapeutic approaches for stage IV metastatic disease mainly focused on interference with melanoma cell proliferation (chemotherapy, radiation), on immunological stimulation (vaccination, blocking of CTLA-4), or on oncogene-targeted therapy (e.g. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ĭutaneous melanoma is a highly aggressive malignancy with increasing incidence, limited therapeutic options in the metastatic stage of disease and a reduced overall survival of 6–9 months in untreated patients and to 5 months after occurrence of brain metastases. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: This project was supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 773 "Understanding and overcoming drug resistance of solid tumors" to CB. Received: SeptemAccepted: DecemPublished: January 14, 2013Ĭopyright: © 2013 Busch et al. University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany Citation: Busch C, Krochmann J, Drews U (2013) The Chick Embryo as an Experimental System for Melanoma Cell Invasion.