Editorial: The functions of extracellular vesicles in melanoma

Melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer, has shown a rising incidence worldwide in recent years. Despite advancements in treatment options, the understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying melanoma progression and metastasis remains a significant challenge (Atkins et al., 2021). Recently, extracellular vesicles (EVs) have emerged as key players in intercellular communication (van Niel et al., 2022), offering new insights into melanoma biology and potential implications for diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic strategies. In this Research Topic of Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, we have curated a Research Topic of articles covering different aspects of EVs biology in melanoma. The study of melanoma-derived vesicles has provided very relevant contributions to the knowledge of the functional roles of EVs in tumor progression and in particular, regarding the formation of pre-metastatic niches and metastatic colonization (Schnaeker et al., 2004; Chen et al., 2006; Peinado et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2018; García-Silva et al., 2021). For adding more evidence to the roles of EVs in metastatic colonization, Chen et al. show in this Research Topic how high-metastatic melanoma cells can augment the proliferation and colonization capability of low-metastatic melanoma cells by transferring exosomal miR-4115p, thus providing a mechanism for EV-meditated communication between tumor clones. This publication has generated a commentary (Li et al., 2022) inspired by this enhancement of metastatic “fitness” due to surrounding tumor EV uptake. On the other hand, the promising use of EVs as biomarkers continues to gather most of the interest of the scientific community. We had the pleasure to include here additional works addressing EV applicability to melanoma diagnosis and therapy monitoring. Gerloff et al. profile miRNAs derived from human melanocyte and melanoma cells and their secreted EVs. Remarkably, they observe that although miRNA content greatly differ between melanocytes and melanoma cells, there is a substantial similarity in miRNA cargo between EVs from melanocytes and melanoma cells. They also identify six miRNAs enriched in both melanoma cells and melanoma cell-derived EVs. Among them, miR-92b-3p, miR-182-5p and miR-183-5p were also significantly augmented in EVs derived from serum of melanoma patients. Their findings support the hypothesis that miRNAs derived from EVs can serve as prognostic or diagnostic markers for liquid biopsy in melanoma. Following a similar approach but in uveal melanoma, Wróblewska et al. identify hsa-miR-144-5p, hsa-miROPEN ACCESS