Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center has initiated tumor mutation testing for a limited number of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. This pilot project for colorectal cancer is part of VICC’s Personalized Cancer Medicine Initiative (PCMI), a program to identify genetic mutations in a patient’s tumor that may be useful in matching the appropriate therapy with each patient. [...]

An uncommon mutation of the BRAF gene in melanoma patients has been found to respond to MEK inhibitor drugs, providing a rationale for routine screening and therapy in melanoma patients who harbor the BRAF L597 mutation. The new study by co-first-authors Kimberly Brown Dahlman, Ph.D., Junfeng Xia, Ph.D., and Katherine Hutchinson, B.S., Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center [...]

Therapies targeted to a specific mutation in the BRAF gene can significantly reduce tumor burden in metastatic melanoma. But these therapies are not suitable for melanomas lacking the mutation, and even tumors carrying the BRAF mutation eventually become resistant to those therapies. Using human melanoma tumors implanted into mice, Ann Richmond, Ph.D., and colleagues assessed [...]

Investigators from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and 12 other centers in the United States and Australia have found that a new drug for patients with metastatic melanoma nearly doubled median overall survival. More than half of patients who were treated with the novel drug vemurafenib, known commercially as Zelboraf, responded to treatment and experienced an impressive [...]

Jeffrey Sosman, M.D., professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), has been named to a melanoma research Dream Team of cancer investigators supported by Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) and the Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA). Sosman is among the Dream Team’s principal investigators who will work closely to write the genomic-driven clinical trials and [...]

A clinical trial of a new experimental therapy for metastatic melanoma being tested at Vanderbilt and several other medical centers has shown positive results, including tumor shrinkage in the majority of patients. The results support previously reported positive data for the drug, known as PLX4032 (RG7204), in a much larger patient population where all responses [...]

A new drug used to treat advanced melanoma patients with a specific genetic mutation in their tumors demonstrated significant tumor shrinkage in the majority of patients during a clinical trials.