1 June

Melanoma was like pancreatic cancer, almost an instant death sentence, particularly when advanced. It’s now not only survivable, it’s almost curable. Once a new drug is found to be effective (often using AI to dramatically shorten discovery time), researchers target the people who do exceptionally well on the new drug (not everybody will). They find out what it is about those people that made such a difference, and then do further development based on that. Often the outcome is ‘combination’ therapies, like here, where a vaccine is added to immunotherapy. These therapies can have broad application across multiple cancers.