Roger Lo on the Evolution of Melanoma During Therapy

Roger Lo, MD, PhD, UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses the evolution of metastatic melanoma during therapy.

Because of mutations in the BRAF gene, patients become resistant to anti-BRAF treatment after a period of time and the tumors start to grow again.

Lo and investigators used genomic and epigenomic profiling to detect changes in the genes’ activities inside the tumor and evaluate the function of the immune cells.

They found that the altered tumor cell behavior originates from the gene activity regulatory mechanism called CpG methylation.