Understanding Biomarkers in Early-Stage Melanoma
Source: Medscape, March 2025
Hello, everybody. My name is Teresa Amaral, and today I’m here to talk to you about biomarkers. I would like to frame this in relation to the treatment of patients with melanoma, especially early-stage melanoma. Do we have any biomarkers that we could use in the early stage of melanoma?
I would like to use a little bit of the knowledge we have from later stages, such as stage IV. But, before we go into that, let’s consider the importance of having such biomarkers by using a clinical case.
I imagined a clinical case of a patient that is 43 years old, diagnosed with stage IIB melanoma — a 2.6-mm tumor thickness with no regression but with ulceration, so it would be a pT3b, and with a sentinel lymph node that was negative. This is stage IIB according to the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) classification, version 8.