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Current issues in melanoma

Current issues highlight some of the latest research into melanoma, new therapies becoming available and new drug treatments coming to the market.

Tumour vaccine therapy in the clinical study of melanoma

The place of tumour vaccine therapy remains the most contentious issue in the clinical study of melanoma. Vaccinia viral lysates, co-administered with melanoma cell preparations, have been...

New American joint committee staging system for malignant melanoma

Some recent reappraisals of the prognostic value of some clinical and histological features, based on large numbers of patients studied in many trials, has led the AJCC to change the staging system....

Sentinal node biopsy and the prognostic value of tumour burden

The sentinel node biopsy technique is a method by which the surgeon samples the regional lymph node(s) that directly drain the area of skin in which the melanoma arose; (it is detected by a...

Randomised trial of chemotherapy versus chemotherapy and immunotherapy for metastatic melanoma

In a trial recently reported from M.D. Anderson Hospital in Texas, the doctors studied 190 patients with metastatic melanoma, treated either by chemotherapy with a standard first line regime (viz....

Morton tones down his opinion on melanoma vaccines when asked to review the subject at the American Society Of Clinical Oncology 2000 annual meeting

Donald Morton, who has been a main protagonist for vaccine therapy in the USAA for some years, reviewed the subject at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and was more...

Temozolamide may have equivalent efficacy to Dtic in the chemotherapy management of metastatic melanoma

In a recent trial in the U.K. the drug temozolamide, usually associated with good responses in some brain tumours (see brain tumour section) ahs been found to be active in the therapy of advanced...

PET scanning becomes the first staging test for detecting metastatic melanoma

The new imaging test – the PET scan, which relies on picking up functional tumour sites within the body, is fast becoming the optimal scanning modality in the systemic staging of melanoma.

Adding to Interferon does not improve results in advanced melanoma

Regimes intended to improve on interferon based therapy for advanced melanoma have not yet proved as successful as had been hoped. Specifically, adding high dose interleukin-2 (IL-2) to a regime of...

High dose Interferon, after operative removal of higher risk skin melanoma, is better than melanoma antigen Gm-2 administration as adjuvant therapy

Administration of high dose interferon, after removal of higher risk skin melanoma, has been shown to reduce the subsequent relapse risk of this cancer; such adjuvant therapy is now standard best...

Prognostic factors in 17,600 melanoma patients validate new us staging system

Recently (J. Clin. Oncol. 2001; vol 19: 3622-3634) the American Joint Committee on Cancer proposed new changes in the staging system for cutaneous/skin melanoma. An analysis of 17,600 patients with...

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