Neil Box, PhD In the summer of 2019, Dr. Neil Box toured Colorado with the Sun Bus, attending events with over 700,000 participants and reaching 26,000 people in 46 service days. Free skin cancer screens identified 96 suspected skin cancers, including six cases of dangerous melanoma. The tour also gave Dr. Box the opportunity to hear what people think about skin cancer and sun protection. “A major bugbear for me was that people feel their sunscreen is going to harm them or damage them in some way,” says Dr. Box, who is a University of Colorado Cancer Center investigator and president of the Co ..read more

Sam’s “life was saved” by an investigator-initiated trial at the University of Colorado Cancer Center Sam with his grandkids shortly after being diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. As the 2018 holidays approached, Sam was given a present he did not want. He was diagnosed with stage four metastatic melanoma. “For Christmas, we took a family photo with all the grandkids,” says Sam’s wife, Janet. She went on to explain, “The kids wanted to take this photo because they thought Sam would not be here next Christmas.” Melanoma is a dangerous type of skin cancer that is likely to grow and sp ..read more

Neil Box, PhD We all know that in the spring or before going on a beach vacation, it’s important to get a solid tan so that we don’t get burned. After all, it’s sun burns and not sun tans that cause skin cancer, right? Not so fast, says Neil Box, PhD, University of Colorado Cancer Center investigator and president of the Colorado Melanoma Foundation. “I know directly from my research that a tan is damage. Just like a burn, a tan is a biomarker of DNA damage that increases skin cancer risk,” says Dr. Box. “Tan damage has a negative effect far in excess of any possible protection offered against ..read more

Neil Box, PhD During COVID19, getting outside for socially distanced activities is one of the few forms of available recreation. But more people getting out also means more sun exposure, and so during Skin Cancer Awareness Month, University of Colorado Cancer Center reached out to one of our members, Neil Box, PhD, president of the Colorado Melanoma Foundation, to learn about the risks and how to stay safe. “COVID19 is dangerous but skin cancer can kill you too,” says Dr. Box. “For some people, a sunburn could be as dangerous as a virus exposure.” According to Dr. Box, while the cancellation o ..read more

Martin McCarter, MD, and colleagues target myeloid-derived suppressor cells in melanoma In melanoma, myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) are bad – the more MDSCs, the poorer a patient’s prognosis. That’s because when these MDSCs expand to accumulate near melanoma tissue and in blood circulation, they suppress the immune system so that it doesn’t attack the cancer. But how do MDSCs expand and how do they accumulate near melanoma tissue? A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the journal Frontiers in Oncology hints at an answer. Chemicals in the body called interl ..read more

When you think of melanoma, you picture the sun. But there is another class of these dangerous cancers that has nothing to do with sun exposure. Mucosal melanomas arise seemingly spontaneously from mucosal tissues, accounting for about 1.3 percent of all melanomas. In part because most of these tissues are hidden, mucosal melanomas tend to be diagnosed late. Late diagnosis combined with lack of response to many newer treatments (especially immunotherapies), leads to a 5-year survival rate for rare melanomas less than half that of the more common form of the disease. Mucosal melanomas inclu ..read more

Boston-area native, Jeremy Hugh, MD, willing to be photographed with wife wearing Yankees hat There are marathons and then there’s the Boston Marathon, when the city takes a holiday and 500,000 people line the streets ten-deep to cheer on runners from all over the world. This year, Jeremy Hugh, who was born just north of Boston in Nashua, NH, will be running with them. “My birthday is within a few days of the marathon and my dad and I always used to go down to watch. I’ve been to I don’t even know how many Boston Marathons, since about age five, all through college at U. Mass, until hea ..read more

Carol Amato, William Robinson and colleagues show that Nf-KB signaling may show which melanomas are “hot” enough to respond to immunotherapy Melanomas tend to be “hot” or “cold” – if they’re hot, immunotherapy lights melanoma tumors like beacons for elimination by the immune system; but 40-50 percent of melanomas are cold, making them invisible to the immune system, and patients with cold tumors tend to show little benefit from immunotherapies. The problem is that it’s been impossible to distinguish a hot melanoma from a cold one – the solution has been to administer immunotherapy and hope ..read more