Understanding How to Advance Immunotherapy Strategy Models in Melanoma
Source: CureToday, April 2025
Melanoma is a key cancer type for developing and testing immunotherapies prior to broader clinical application across other malignancies, Dr. Georgina Long explained in an interview with CURE.
“Melanoma is a great cancer to test immunotherapies in because we’re very well benchmarked; we don’t have any legacy drugs, meaning we don’t have a history of activity of drug therapies that dates back to the 1960s with chemotherapy,” said Long. “Nothing worked. So, when I came into the field, patients were dying, literally within six to nine months. When you have that lack of activity, you have a lot of ability to think outside the box and push the field forward.”
Long is a professor and medical director at the Melanoma Institute Australia, as well as the chair of Melanoma Medical Oncology and Translational Research at MIA and Royal North Shore Hospital, The University of Sydney.