CSPG4 and cancer: Transcriptomic analyses of publicly available datasets confirmed significantly higher levels of CSPG4 gene expression in melanomas compared with other tumor types among several tumor cell lines (n = 8–127 per cancer type) and human cancer tissues (n = 102–1075 per cancer type)28,29 (Fig. 1a, b, respectively), and in cutaneous melanomas (n = 461) compared to normal skin (n = 558) tissues (Fig. 1c).