Help Cure Cancer

Melanoma is the fastest-growing cancer type, with 50,000 new cases in the U.S., and over 200,000 worldwide each year. If found early, before the tumor penetrates to the living skin layers, it is nearly 100% curable by surgery. However, once it spreads to the lymph and bloodstream, five-year survival rates drop to less than 10% for those with melanoma tumors in the lungs, liver, and brain. The disease often strikes younger patients in otherwise perfect health, especially those with an active, outdoor lifestyle with its increased exposure to UV rays from the sun.
To add more to the melanoma fear factor, there are no effective treatments for the disease beyond surgical removal. A massive study of thousands of patients in Europe concluded that the standby drug for Stage III melanoma that has spread to the lymph system had no survival benefit compared to observation. For Stage IV patients, the only drug to show any effective result is a substance called Interleukin-2. The IL-2 treatments are so toxic that the patients must be in the hospital the entire time, and has a 5% rate of heart attacks for an equivalent rate of complete responses to the treatment.
New treatments are despeately needed, and there is tremendous potential for vaccines, which have been in the developing stages for the past 20 years. Vaccines have seen limited success because of science, business model, and regulatory hurdles preventing the most promising treatments from being tested in clincal trials.