Increasing rates of melanoma diagnosis in recent years may be due to overdiagnosis of the skin cancer in patients with a very low risk of death and stage 1 lesions that are 1 mm or smaller, according to recent study findings in Cancer.
2022
Every Patient With Metastatic Melanoma “Deserves a Shot at Nivolumab/Ipilimumab,” Weber Says
The combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) have shown overall survival (OS) benefit in patients with metastatic melanoma, according to long-term follow-up data, and other studies’ results highlight the efficacy and toxicity benefits of different sequences of the combination, Jeffrey S. Weber, MD, PhD, said during a presentation at the 40th Annual CFS®.
Making melanoma cells immortal comes down to previously unknown gene mutation synergies
For a cell to become cancerous, it must cross the threshold of immortality—that is, it must transform into an infinitely dividing machine. Many cells like those in the skin cancer melanoma are thought to be immortalized due to mutations in the gene TERT. But scientists have puzzled over why the same TERT mutations seen in patients aren’t enough to immortalize cells in a test tube.
Risk of death for some melanomas less than 1%: Study
Research published in CANCER has found evidence that some cases of melanoma are much less likely to cause death, with one subset of patients – comprising a quarter of the study’s 11,592 participants – found to have a less than 1% risk of dying.