Scientists know that melanoma has a genetic component – mutations have been found in up to 40% of families with a high rate of melanoma. If you have a first-degree relative with melanoma, you are 2-3 times more likely to develop the disease. And the more relatives you have with melanoma, the risk rate increases drastically. There are several genes… Read more »
Immunotherapy has been featured a lot on this blog because of the potential to dramatically improve the survival rates of cancer patients, including those struck by melanoma. Obviously, I’m not the only one excited about the progress made in this field. This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to two immunology researchers – Dr. James Allison of the MD… Read more »
There has been a flurry of news reports regarding a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that claims scientists may have developed a vaccine that when used in conjunction with other cancer therapies increases the chances of melanoma survival rates. The researchers developed a so-called cancer vaccine and then decided to look at whether using a combination… 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 »
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 »