Blood Test To Determine Melanoma Survival Rates

Research at the University of Leicester will be breaking new ground in the search for a simple blood test that could tell whether a patient with melanoma has the condition in an aggressive form.

Melanoma is the most aggressive form of skin cancer.  Staging, which involves determining the size of the tumor and its extent of spread, is the best predictor of whether a patient will succumb to disease or survive.

However, its predictive ability is relatively inaccurate, particularly for patients with melanomas that have invaded deeply into the skin.

A simple blood test that can be used alongside staging to improve the accuracy of outcome prediction would therefore be an extremely important development.

The project, led by histopathologist Dr Gerald Saldanha and Dr Howard Pringle, both in the University of Leicester Department of Cancer Studies and Molecular Medicine, aims to assess whether the measurement of a certain class of molecule called microRNA can identify patients who are more likely to have aggressive melanoma.

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