As readers of the blog may know, I live in Austin. Our local television station ran a story about a new radiation-based skin cancer treatment that sounded interesting. The treatment is an FDA approved non-surgical treatment called Superficial Radiation. The claim is that the treatment destroys skin cancer cells without damaging healthy tissue. For maximum effectiveness, you need 8-10 treatments, which last… 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 »
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 »
A friend of mine sent me a recent article from Fox News. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Fox News is not exactly a bastion of medical or scientific reporting in my book. But the article talks about how researchers at a cancer institute in Utah is engineering the herpes virus and injecting them directly into melanoma tumors…. Read more »