Source: Nebraska Medicine, June 2025
When most people think of melanoma, they think of skin cancer. If left untreated, melanoma can spread throughout the body. But in rare cases, melanomas start in the esophagus or the stomach or elsewhere in the gastrointestinal tract. Unfortunately, these rare melanomas are diagnosed late, tend to be more aggressive, and are associated with a worse prognosis.
And because these melanomas are so rare, relatively little research has been done on them. Pauline Xu, MD, PhD, a first-year resident in UNMC’s Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, hopes to change that. She and her mentor, Dinesh Pradhan, MD, an associate professor in the department, are doing a study they hope will start to bridge that knowledge gap.
“One of the things we’re trying to understand is what kind of changes in our DNA can drive that process and find ways to hopefully target that,” Dr. Xu said. Because so far in trials for patients who have this rarer type of melanoma, she said, current immunotherapy options haven’t consistently had the same efficacy for them.