Emerging and targeted therapies for skin cancer highlighted at AAD meeting

This year, more than one million new cases of skin cancer will be diagnosed in the USA alone. Fortunately, if detected early, this potentially deadly condition is extremely treatable, averaging a cure rate of 95%. While current treatments for skin cancer involve treating or removing both cancerous and healthy skin, advanced research is producing new therapies which treat only the cancerous cells.

Speaking late July at ACADEMY '06, the American Academy of Dermatology's summer scientific meeting, dermatologist Hensin Tsao, assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, discussed emerging treatments for skin cancer.

"Cancer occurs when a normal cell in the body circumnavigates the normal growth checks and evades the immune system," explained Dr Tsao. "As technologies have advanced, it has become easier to identify cancer mutations, allowing us to better understand these growth signals and utilize this information to develop therapies that specifically target cancer cells," he said.