Melanoma News and Research

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Melanoma is a form of cancer that begins in melanocytes (cells that make the pigment melanin). It may begin in a mole (skin melanoma), but can also begin in other pigmented tissues, such as in the eye or in the intestines.

CD5-expressing dendritic cells help to prime T cell responses against cancer

Immunotherapy has transformed cancer care. In advanced melanoma, for example, the most fatal form of skin cancer, the five-year survival rate has risen from less than 10% to more than 50% since immunotherapy was introduced in 2011.

17 Feb 2023

Combination of two types of immune cells helps predict response to cancer immunotherapy

Thanks to a new prognostic method for detecting cancers including cancer of the large intestine, doctors could provide clearer disease prognoses and predict which patients will respond best to immunotherapy.

10 Feb 2023

Study sheds light on why lung tumors do not respond well to immunotherapy

Immunotherapy -; drug treatment that stimulates the immune system to attack tumors -; works well against some types of cancer, but it has shown mixed success against lung cancer.

6 Feb 2023

Scientists develop new design principles to improve cancer vaccines

A new way to significantly increase the potency of almost any vaccine has been developed by researchers from the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University.

1 Feb 2023

Novel adoptive T cell receptor therapy shows promising results for patients with solid tumors

Afamitresgene autoleucel (afami-cel; formerly ADP-A2M4), an adoptive T cell receptor (TCR) therapy targeting the MAGE-A4 cancer antigen, achieved clinically significant results for patients with multiple solid tumor types in a Phase I clinical trial led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

30 Jan 2023

Persistent tumor mutation load may help predict outcome of novel immunotherapies

Cancer experts have tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to use the total number of mutations in a tumor, called the tumor mutation burden (TMB), to predict a patient's response to immunotherapy.

27 Jan 2023

Improving cancer immunotherapies with bioengineered synthetic gene circuits

In two distinct studies, scientists show how synthetic biology can be used to address a challenging problem in cancer immunotherapy: the way immunotherapy-related approaches focused on the short-term killing of tumor cells could fail to eradicate tumors because tumor growth occurs on longer timescales.

19 Dec 2022

Different cancers carry distinctive genetic signatures

After analyzing data from a public repository, CD4-T, CD8-T cells, and Treg cells, a team of researchers led by bioinformatics Mabel Vidal from the University of Concepcion and working with researchers from MELISA Institute and other academic institutions discovered a distinctive genetic signature among subsets of infiltrating T cells of various types of cancer.

4 Nov 2022

New approach to clear early stage pre-cancerous tumor cells

A novel method of reprogramming the immune cells to shrink or destroy cancer cells has been demonstrated to work in melanoma, a difficult to treat and destructive skin cancer.

1 Nov 2022

New tool advances potential means to deliver gene therapy

Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine claim to have successfully “slid” genetic instructions into a cell and produced essential proteins that were lacking from those cells using a cell’s normal process for creating proteins.

1 Nov 2022

Delicate strategy employed by pathogens to suppress pyroptosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacteria that causes tuberculosis (TB), continues to be a major infectious threat to global public health.

18 Oct 2022

Antibiotics deplete intestinal flora and weaken the immune response

According to a recent study conducted by scientists at Emory University in Atlanta, the administration of broad-spectrum antibiotics in mice with malignant melanoma, an aggressive type of skin cancer, expedited their metastatic bone growth.

12 Sep 2022

Researchers develop targeted immunotherapy to destroy tumor cells

A minimally invasive technique was created and improved by scientists at Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI) to develop immunotherapeutic cancer treatments.

3 Aug 2022

Researchers find active protein in tumor cells might help in new cancer treatments

A discovery regarding how a particular protein is triggered in tumor cells, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, may lead to more effective therapies for some of the deadliest types of cancer.

20 Jul 2022

New computer model helps identify mutations that drive tumor growth

Cancer cells can have thousands of mutations in their DNA. However, only a handful of those actually drive the progression of cancer; the rest are just along for the ride.

22 Jun 2022

Researchers created ultrasound-guided microbubbles to enhance immunotherapy performance

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center scientists have created an ultrasound-guided cancer immunotherapy approach that promotes systemic antitumor immunity and increases immune checkpoint blockade therapeutic potential. Nature Nanotechnology published the results of the pioneering study.

1 Jun 2022

Cancer biomarkers relying on methylation could forecast tumor type

In cancer management, biomarkers are commonly used to guide treatment decisions and evaluate patient outcomes.

23 May 2022

Research sheds light on mechanism for skin cell death, likely to help treat cancer

Researchers at Emory University have uncovered a mechanism for skin cell death that might lead to novel therapies for “flesh-eating” infections, alopecia, hives, and possibly even melanoma, the deadliest type of skin cancer.

18 May 2022

Study shows the role of mucosal-associated invariant T cell in mucosal melanomas patients

Many cancer patients have benefited from the development of anti-cancer immunotherapy drugs known as immune checkpoint inhibitors, but patients with mucosal melanomas—melanomas that occur in the mucous membranes of the head, neck, eyes, respiratory system, and genitourinary region rather than on the skin—are highly resistive to immune checkpoint inhibitors for reasons researchers do not fully understand.

29 Apr 2022

Vitamin E can reinvigorate dendritic cells to enhance immunotherapy responses

Combining a retrospective analysis of clinical records with in-depth laboratory studies, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered that vitamin E can enhance immunotherapy responses by stimulating the activity of dendritic cells in the tumor.

18 Apr 2022