More than 16,000 Australians will be diagnosed with melanoma each year. Most of these will be caught early, and can be cured by surgery.
However, for patients with advanced or metastatic melanoma, which has spread from the skin to other organs, the outlook was bleak until the advent of targeted therapies (that attack specific cancer traits) and immune therapies (that leverage the immune system). Over the past decade, these treatments have seen a significant climb in the number of advanced melanoma patients surviving for at least five years after diagnosis, from less than 10% in 2011 to around 50% in 2021.
