News & Publications
The latest news and publications about Merkel cell carcinoma and merkelcell.org.
This observational study of melanoma patients found that high fiber intake was correlated with a better response to immunotherapy treatment. This benefit was most pronounced in patients who had high fiber intake and did not use probiotic supplements. While future studies will provide additional insi...
Read more →Congratulations to these Italian authors who carried out an interesting survey of Merkel cell carcinoma management by over 300 ‘front-line’ physicians from the region of Italy that includes Rome. Among the 10 figures included in the survey, they depict the common dilemmas faced by most physicia...
Read more →’Adjuvant’ therapy is given to patients when there is no clear evidence of cancer, but the goal is to decrease the risk the cancer will come back following initial therapy. In this meeting abstract presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology by Dr. Juergen Becker, the authors report e...
Read more →This review discusses an ever-expanding set of options to study MCC using cells and mouse models. These tools are increasingly important as the number of candidate therapies for MCC is expanding and the field needs to prioritize which ones to take forward into human clinical trials.
Read more →MCC has a high chance (about 60%) of responding to immune therapy with PD-1 blocking agents. Remarkably, the chance that virus-negative MCC tumors will respond to immune therapy is the same as for virus-positive tumors, although the targets the immune system ‘sees’ are very different in nature.
Read more →More than half of patients with advanced MCC will not respond persistently to one of the FDA-approved immune therapies (pembrolizumab or avelumab). Addressing this need is the most pressing issue in our field. This study by Dr. Shalhout and colleagues, carried out in Boston, found that none of 13 pa...
Read more →The basis for the activity in Merkel cell carcinoma of an oral ‘MDM2 inhibitor’, milademetan (Rain Therapeutics), is nicely explained in this study. For this therapy to work, the p53 protein (the 'guardian of the genome') must not have been directly mutated in the MCC tumor cells, meaning p53 wo...
Read more →This study presents a risk score model that predicts how well MCC patients will do and uses factors beyond ‘cancer stage’ by the standard American Joint Commission on Cancer (AJCC). These factors included male sex and immune compromise, as well as characteristics that are included in cancer stag...
Read more →Management of MCC and other skin cancers has been changing rapidly. The Society for Immune Therapy for Cancer (SITC) has tried to address this challenge by assembling a highly collaborative, multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team of clinicians that was led by Ann Silk & Isaac Brownell. Over th...
Read more →Merkel cell carcinoma that truly arises outside of the skin is incredibly rare. We have seen a few cases arising inside the nose but neuroendocrine cancers arising elsewhere in the body, away from skin, may not actually be "Merkel cell carcinoma". In this case arising in the lower gastro-intestinal ...
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