Identification of Risk Factors, Exposomics and Genetic Susceptibility of Melanoma in Children, Adolescents and Young Adults

Overview

The primary objective of this study is the identification of environmental and genetic factors involved in the risk and progression of melanoma in children, adolescents and young adults (CAYA). The secondary objectives are to generate a model integrating the genetic and environmental factors to estimate the risk of developing melanoma and improve the primary prevention of melanoma through evidence-based interpretation of environmental risk.

By retrieving data from several epidemiological and clinical registries across Europe it is aimed to integrate and maximize efforts in order to create a large dataset that serves for a comprehensive analysis of genetic and environmental factors influencing the etiology of melanoma in CAYA. The data will be combined with exposome information about climate and pollution for the development of a weighted risk score. Furthermore, germline high risk mutations and germline low-medium risk variants will be analyzed. Genome and transcriptome sequencing of blood and in selected cases tumour will provide the most comprehensive data to create a polygenic risk score for CAYA melanoma. Transcriptome data will help to identify and characterize the effect of variants of unknown significance in coding, intronic as well as regulatory regions. Tumour sequencing can provide additional information on functional relevance of variants, e.g. secondary hits in tumour tissue or second hits in tumour suppressor genes. Such identification will be highly advantageous to design prevention strategies for melanoma development in CAYA.

Conditions