Moving the Needle on Monitoring Skin Cancer

Patients with melanoma, the most concerning form of skin cancer in which pigment-producing cells start to grow out of control, can benefit from existing immunotherapies, but by far not all of them do. More than 50 percent of patients do not respond to current immunotherapy drugs and among those that initially respond, many become resistant to the drugs’ effects. Thus, besides developing more effective immunotherapies, doctors need to be able to determine which patients respond well at the start of treatments and, which ones keep or stop responding in order to make the best treatment decisions.