Grant: Project Grant

Skin melanoma is one of the fastest rising cancers. It is also the deadliest form of skin cancer. Melanomas come from melanocytes. These are the cells that cause you to tan when you are exposed to the sun. Melanomas arise when individual melanocytes acquire specific DNA changes, called mutations. Many of these mutations are caused by sun exposure. These mutations allow melanocytes to grow uncontrollably leading to melanoma. For melanomas to continue to grow uncontrollably, they also need to gain the ability to escape being seen from the immune system. The research community has made significant progress to develop new treatments for patients. These include two types. The first type is a treatment called targeted therapies, which are drugs that specifically kill melanoma cells by targeting mutations that cause melanoma. The second type is a treatment called immune therapy. This type of therapy helps the immune system recognize melanomas as foreign and harnesses the power of a patient's immune system to eliminate melanoma cells. An important challenge is emerging in clinical practice in deciding between targeted and immune therapies. Some types of mutations lead to better responses to immune therapy and worse to targeted therapy. And vice versa. The first goal of this proposal is to figure out why this is the case. The second goal of this project is to test new drugs against mutations that lead to therapy resistance. We hope that the work performed in this proposal will provide doctors with knowledge to help them prescribe the right drug at the right time, and the ability to prescribe new drugs to overcome therapy resistance.