Multi-Omics-Driven Biomarkers for Precision Medicine in Cutaneous Melanoma

Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is a public health issue and a major challenge for scientists. At the dawn of the "omics era", we witnessed groundbreaking advances in CM molecular stratification and therapeutic management assisted by genomic profiling and sequencing technologies. However, melanomagenesis is a complex and multifactorial process that cannot be restricted only to genomic aspects, requiring investigation from a multi-omics perspective. The integration of multi-omics data in a physiological and clinical context may provide new clues about the mechanisms of CM initiation, progression, and metastasis, as well as novel biological pathways amenable to targeted therapy. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is an important repository of multiple types of omics data, and in particular, for CM, it has been shown that multi-integration can lead to prognosis models with improved prediction performance. Among clinicians and researchers, multi-omics-based-biomarkers are regarded with enthusiasm as they offer new opportunities for clinical trials design and reduce the time and cost of developing new treatments. We present herein how droplet digital PCR (ddPCR), a relatively young omics technology can complement existing approaches in the field to detect multiple types of alterations in both body fluids as well as formalin-fixed tissues harvested from CM patients and how these findings may broaden our vision on CM research, diagnosis, prognosis and therapy in the context of precision medicine.