I just read a discouraging article that notes that patients with darker skin tones have a much worse chance of their melanoma becoming fatal. The article references a study performed by Case Western Reserve University (incidentally close to my hometown in Ohio and a very well-respected institution) that found that patients with black skin had the worst survival rates for melanoma…. Read more »
My news feed lit up today with a bunch of links talking about research done by a German and Israeli team showing how skin cancer cells develop and spread. This important research will hopefully show how skin cancer cells spread throughout the body. As you already know, melanoma is one of the deadliest types of cancer once it has spread… Read more »
There was a recent article on msn.com that talked about myths regarding sun exposure. Although we may think we know everything there is to know about protecting yourself from harmful sun exposure, it’s still good to have a reminder. Let’s start with the first, and to my mind, obvious. How many of you remember trying to get a base tan… Read more »
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (knowns as the CDC, a U.S. national public health institute) conducted a survey on sunscreen usage. The results were alarming, especially for someone who has battled melanoma and would hate to see anyone else have to go through the process. Only 14.3% of men and 29.9% of women reported regularly using… Read more »
I was clicking around on the internet and was on a story that talked about how cheap drugstore brands are more effective at helping aging skin look younger than the expensive skin care lotions (don’t judge, you know you want to read that article too), when I saw a sidebar with the story headline “Surprising Causes of Skin Cancer“. Of course,… Read more »
I’ve posted a few times regarding immunotherapy (both its historical context as well as newer attempts using microneedles). I just came across another article that shows promise in treating melanoma with targeted and personalized melanoma cancer vaccines, using the patients’ own immune system to help combat the disease. In the article, two melanoma patients whose cancer had metastasized to the… Read more »
In my ongoing quest to provide to you, my readers, interesting news about skin cancer treatments, I found a very recent article that describes efforts by researchers to develop a patch of microneedles that would deliver immunotherapy nanoparticles directly into melanoma lesions. In a previous series of posts, I wrote about an article that discusses how immunotherapy might be a… Read more »
A sobering report from the Cleveland Clinic has found that melanoma is five times more deadly for women who are pregnant or had given birth within the year. “We saw significant, worse prognoses and outcomes for women with a pregnancy-associated melanoma, compared to a control group of non-pregnant women,” stated primary author and plastic surgeon Brian Gastman. Obviously, the female human… Read more »
My previous post talked about the history of using the immune T-cells in the fight against cancer. I’m picking up the thread of the story where the human experiments began… A small pharmaceutical company approached by researcher Jim Allison, Medarex, decided to begin human trials using patients diagnosed with malignant melanoma. Melanoma sometimes responds to immunotherapy treatment. The first experiments… Read more »
Disclaimer: I’m a science nerd. I love the compilations like the Best American Science and Nature Writing. I got the 2013 edition out of the library and there was an article, originally published in The New Yorker, entitled The T-Cell Army. The article discussed the history of Dr. William Coley, a surgeon in 1890s New York City who lost a… Read more »