Empower Your Fight Against Melanoma
Melanoma is the most aggressive form of skin cancer. Discover why protecting your viable tumor samples from typical lab disposal drives incredible advantages in immunotherapy and targeted mutation mapping.
Talk to a Care SpecialistWhat is Melanoma?
Melanoma develops from melanocytes, the cells that give your skin its color. While it accounts for a small percentage of skin cancer diagnoses, it causes the vast majority of skin cancer deaths.
It possesses extraordinary metastatic potential, meaning it can spread rapidly to the brain, liver, and lungs. However, it is also one of the cancers most responsive to modern immunology.
What Does Melanoma Do?
Melanoma quickly infiltrates the dermis to access vascular and lymphatic superhighways.
- Aggressive Metastasis: It can implant and aggressively grow in completely disparate organ environments.
- Brain Affinity: Melanoma has a notoriously high propensity to spread to the brain, drastically complicating systemic treatment.
- Immune Evasion: The tumors expertly deploy protein shields to invisibly hide from the body's natural T-cell immune defenses.
Current Treatment Options
Wide Local Excision & Lymph Node Dissection
Deep surgical removal of the skin lesion and surgical exploration/clearance of the regional draining lymph nodes.
Immune Checkpoint Blockade
Systemic infusions of PD-1 and CTLA-4 inhibitors that rip away the tumor's invisibility cloak, causing massive immune responses.
BRAF/MEK Targeted Therapy
For the roughly 50% of melanomas with a BRAF mutation, extremely potent oral inhibitors shut down the tumor's primary growth engine immediately.
Why Bank Your Living Melanoma Tissue?
Melanoma is the pioneer cancer for modern immunotherapy (like TILs - Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes). By cryopreserving your living node biopsy or metastasis, you preserve the actual T-cells inside the tumor, leaving the most cutting-edge, personalized cellular therapies available to you.
TIL Therapy Readiness
Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes therapy requires massive harvest and laboratory expansion of the immune cells residing directly inside your living tumor.
Comprehensive BRAF Mapping
Ensure continuous access to viable tissue to map BRAF and NRAS mutations, predicting exactly which pathway inhibitors will succeed.
Immune Response Simulation
Test multiple immune-checkpoint inhibitors against your live cancer landscape to gauge true immunological reaction.
Resistance circumvention
Targeted therapies in melanoma often eventually fail; having the baseline 3D biology maps out why and how to circumvent it.