I know I post a lot of stories about immunotherapy. The potential for that type of treatment could revolutionize how we fight melanoma. But a new study caught my eye and it’s definitely an intriguing avenue of research. Some melanoma tumors arise from a mutation in the BRAF gene, most common type being the V600E (but there are other mutation… 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 »
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 »
In my last post, I mentioned that the FDA has not updated the safety standards for U.S. sunscreens in just about 40 years. In the meantime, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia have access to innovative sunscreen formulations that do a better job of protecting the skin. Think about it this way, in the U.S. we’re still on mainframe computers using… Read more »
I wrote a post a week or so ago about research that shows that taking chondroitin sulfate may actually trigger melanoma tumor growth. And then this week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (better known as the FDA) released a press announcement calling out three separate dietary supplements that claim to provide protection from sunburn, skin aging, and even skin cancer…. Read more »