IL-1 Increases Oxidative Stress and Promotes Growth in Melanoma

About 160,000 new cases of melanoma are diagnosed worldwide each year, and about 48,000 melanoma related deaths each year account for the majority (75%) of deaths related to skin cancer. Growth and metastasis of this often fatal cancer is strongly associated with the inflammatory process, as melanomas are known to secrete high levels of proinflammatory cytokines, such as IL-1, and produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS). In their study published in the September, 2011 issue of Molecular Cancer Research, Yong Qin and co-workers from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, (Houston, TX), and the Massachusetts General Hospital, (Boston, MA) used an IHC-based tissue microarray study to confirm that IL-1, particularly IL-1α, was significantly elevated in primary melanoma tissues. They subsequently interrupted the IL-1 signaling pathway in vitro using siRNA to inhibit IL-1α, IL-1β, MyD88, and blocking antibodies to IL-1RI. Inhibition of IL-1 signaling resulted in decreased levels of reactive oxidative species, as measured by Enzo Life Sciences’ ROS/RNS detection kit for microscopy, as well as other downstream signaling proteins including COX-2, and phosphorylated IκB and SAPK/JNK. Their studies indicate that the elevated oxidative stress induced by constitutive autocrine IL-1 is a driving force in chronic inflammation in human melanoma cells and that selectively inhibiting IL-1 signaling may be a promising therapeutic strategy in the subgroup of melanoma patients with constitutively high IL-1 production.

Enzo Life Sciences offers a comprehensive range of products for measuring oxidative stress levels of various sample types with many different methods, some of which are described below:

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