5 Key Takeaways

• 1

  Epidermal CD271 expression outperformed Ki67 and PRAME for diagnosing challenging melanocytic lesions, according to a study presented at ECP 2026.

• 2

  The study involved 156 challenging melanocytic lesions, with CD271 quantified manually and Ki-67 and PRAME analyzed using AI-driven image analysis.

• 3

  In benign nevi, CD271 was expressed in almost all basal keratinocytes, while this pattern was lost in melanomas, indicating significant differences.

• 4

  CD271 demonstrated a ROC curve of 0.93, outperforming PRAME at 0.84 and Ki-67 at 0.83 in diagnostic performance.

• 5

  The findings suggest that the epidermal niche may provide additional diagnostic information for assessing melanocytic lesions.