The immune system is an incredible evolutionary machine, designed to protect us from the ravages of bacteria, viruses, and other harmful microbes. But admittedly, there are some times when the immune system doesn’t work the way it is supposed to, giving rise to auto-immune disorders. And now scientists have demonstrated how a hijack of the immune system from melanoma cells… Read more »
Immunotherapy is helping cancer patients, including those with melanoma, to more successfully fight their diseases. However, a new study released in this month’s Cancer Discovery highlights the fact that a more personalized approach could be even more successful. Brief background… immunotherapy works by activating the body’s T cells to find and destroy cancer cells. Obviously, this only works if the T… Read more »
The 2018 NCRI Cancer Conference recently wrapped up in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the most disheartening research results reported is the fact that the rate of men dying from melanoma has risen around the world. So, you might ask, isn’t the rate of melanoma death rates rising anyway? Well, in some countries the death rates are steady or even falling for… Read more »
It seems like every other day, my Google News alert regarding melanoma research lights up with another advance using immunotherapy. This one comes from a team at UCLA who combined immunotherapy with an experimental sequence of nucleic acids that mimics a bacterial infection. The researchers provided 22 people who had inoperable or advanced metastasized melanoma an immunotherapy drug called pembrolizumab… Read more »
When I wrote my previous blog post about checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy, I didn’t realize that Phase 2 of the clinical trials were being released later on that day. Researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (here in the Lone Star State) performed clinical trial checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy in 94 patients with melanoma that had spread to the… Read more »
I think that’s the cheesiest headline for a blog post I’ve ever written and I’ve written a few doozies over the past almost 4 years… Anyway, I should make it clear that I know absolutely nothing about Dancing With the Stars. In fact, I really don’t know much about TV shows in general anymore. The last time I voluntarily turned… Read more »
So in the last post, I talked about checkpoint blockade immunotherapy and the results it had on prolonging survival rates for those with brain metastases. In the post, I referenced a protein called PD-1, which is found on T cells and acts as a brake on the immune response. Using immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs releases that brake and allows the… Read more »
As I have mentioned a few times in this blog, melanoma has a disconcerting tendency to spread to the lungs, liver, and brain when it enters into the metastasizing stages. And brain tumors like that are pretty darn hard to treat. Most of the current treatments don’t really provide much benefit to patients. And once melanoma metastasizes, only about half… Read more »
If you follow the news regarding advancements in melanoma detection and treatment as much as I do, you may have seen the news story that researchers in Australia have been working on developing a blood test that could identify early-stage melanoma. This is really exciting news because as we all know, the earlier you detect melanoma, the better the odds… Read more »
If you or a loved one has been prescribed hydrochlorothiazide, you may want to be extra vigilant about checking for skin changes. That’s because long-term use of this common diuretic has been previously linked to lip and non-melanoma cancers, but a new study may also extend those increased risks to melanoma. “We have recently shown that hydrochlorothiazide use increases the… Read more »