Stories of immunotherapy’s success against metastatic melanoma in patients such as former President Jimmy Carter are well publicized, but the treatment doesn’t work for everyone.
In fact, checkpoint blockade drugs such as pembrolizumab and nivolumab, which inhibit protein molecules on T cells that keep the immune system from attacking tumors, only work for about one-third of patients.
Why do some tumors respond...

Patrick Hwu, M.D., head of MD Anderson's Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology, presented evidence supporting the combination of BRAF inhibitors...
Read between the lines and you'll find an MD Anderson Cancer Center connection to one of Discover's top 100 stories of 2011, announced in...
A study led by Melanoma Medical Oncology Department researcher Michael A. Davies, M.D., Ph.D., published in the journal Cancer identifies significant predictive associations of certain gene mutations with the risk of brain metastasis as well as outcome after diagnosis of stage IV disease.
Davies, senior author of the article, and colleagues at MD Anderson Cancer Center analyzed data collected from 677 melanoma patients who were...