After its secretion by malignant melanoma cells, MIA interacts with fibronectin and thereby actively facilitates focal cell detachment from surrounding structures and strongly promotes tumor cell invasion and the formation of metastases.
S100 and MIA are highly sensitive tumor markers for monitoring of patients with melanoma with current metastases, but less sensitive for monitoring of tumor-free patients.
Analogous experiments using human pancreas cancer MIA PaCa-2 cells provided findings roughly similar to those from the experiments using HCT116 cells except for lack of suppression of metastases by macrophages in NOG hosts.
Furthermore, none of the 16 PBMC samples of patients in stage IV without clinically detectable metastases at that time point during chemotherapy was MIA mRNA-positive.