Tackling Melanoma with Precision: The Quest for a Biomarker
Source: Amsterdam UMC, February 2024
Each year, the Cancer Center Amsterdam (CCA) Foundation champions cutting-edge cancer research by funding promising proposals from CCA researchers. This ‘seed-funding’ empowers CCA scientists to pursue innovative research directions in support of our goal to cure cancer. With this support, Wouter Ouwerkerk intends to pursue a genetic biomarker that can accurately identify the risk of progression for patients with stage II melanoma.
Melanoma poses a significant health challenge worldwide. In the Netherlands alone, over 8,000 individuals are diagnosed with this skin cancer annually, a number that is increasing by 4% each year. While most people are diagnosed with stage I melanoma, approximately 14% are identified at stage II. At this stage, 15-20% of patients are likely to develop metastases within five years, progressing to stage III.
Sentinel gland examination is a common method to identify high-risk stage II patients, but the sensitivity of this procedure is poor, as evidenced by the fact that patients with negative sentinel node results still have a significant risk of progression.