Empowered Patient Podcast How Molecular Testing is Changing Melanoma Treatments with Dr. Alex Meves SkylineDx
Dr. Alex Meves, distinguished dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic and a spokesperson for SkylineDx, discusses the challenges in diagnosing and treating melanoma and how a new molecular test called Merlin can help improve risk stratification and treatment decisions for patients with early-stage melanoma. Diagnosis and treatment have traditionally used tumor thickness as a primary risk factor. This molecular test measures the expression of genes in the tumor biopsy and can help determine the extent of surgery needed and whether additional therapies may be beneficial.
Alex explains, "My department, when I started to work here at Mayo, wanted me to do some translational research, and I had just come back from a postdoc in Germany, at the Max Planck Institute, and I was tasked to get some research going. And so I focused on melanoma because I thought at the time there wasn't a lot of molecular research going on in melanoma that could be translated to patients. And so we started to develop biomarkers, sort of molecular tests that we could apply to tissue, and then help patients with."
"Yes, so the problem that our research is focused on is what to do once you're diagnosed with a melanoma. What you want to do is to match the right therapy to the right patient. That's the goal. There are lots of melanomas that might not be very aggressive, and you don't have to do a lot of treatment. And then there's some melanoma that's very aggressive, and you want to do lots of treatment, but it's not always obvious which melanoma is low risk and which melanoma is high risk. And so this idea of risk stratification at diagnosis becomes very important to match therapy to patients."
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