Hey y’all, I’m very excited to let you know that I’ve moved my blog to my own domain: pinkmelanoma.com! You may have visited the blog only see that there has been some changes to the appearance of pinkmelanoma. But maybe you didn’t see that the URL has changed too. Don’t worry, all of the content on the blog has moved… 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 »
Today is one of those days that should be uniting us against the darkness of fanaticism and tribalism. I remember for a number of weeks right after 9/11, there was no divisive name-calling across the political aisle. There was none of the rancor and hatred directly towards some group deemed less American than others that we’re mired in now. Instead,… Read more »
So, I’m up in Ohio this week to hang out with my mom and try to be helpful for some of the remaining financial and legal tasks from dealing with my dad’s passing. It’s really weird to be in the house and not have my dad here or at least not needing to get going up to the hospital. I… 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 »
For a period of time in my late teens, I had a thing for Lord Bryon’s work. I mean, I still like it but I’ve not actively read his poems for fun since I lived in Miami. Anyway, the reason why I’m mentioning my proclivity for Romantic poets at all is because there is a line in Byron’s The Island… 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 »
Since my dad died, I get this question a lot – how are you doing? And some days, I answer with an “ehh” sound; some days I reply “doing OK”; but some days that question is met with a grimace and I can’t ever answer at all. That horrible, crushing feeling of grief – the kind that won’t let you… 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 »