News & Publications

This review discusses an ever-expanding set of options to study MCC using cells and mouse models. These tools are increasingly important as the number of candidate therapies for MCC is expanding and the field needs to prioritize which ones to take forward into human clinical trials.

The immune stimulating drug combination called ‘ipi-nivo’ (IPIlimumab or Yervoy targets CTLA4 while NIVOlumab or Opdivo targets PD1) has an established role in melanoma, but less is known about using this double therapy in Merkel cell carcinoma. A major study published in the Lancet and led by K...

The University of Washington's Nghiem Lab held its annual Merkel CELLebration & Dinner on Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, at the UW Medicine Research Campus in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. Each year the Nghiem Lab hosts the event to share the latest advances in the treatment of Merkel cell car...

MCC has a high chance (about 60%) of responding to immune therapy with PD-1 blocking agents. Remarkably, the chance that virus-negative MCC tumors will respond to immune therapy is the same as for virus-positive tumors, although the targets the immune system ‘sees’ are very different in nature.

More than half of patients with advanced MCC will not respond persistently to one of the FDA-approved immune therapies (pembrolizumab or avelumab). Addressing this need is the most pressing issue in our field. This study by Dr. Shalhout and colleagues, carried out in Boston, found that none of 13 pa...

The basis for the activity in Merkel cell carcinoma of an oral ‘MDM2 inhibitor’, milademetan (Rain Therapeutics), is nicely explained in this study. For this therapy to work, the p53 protein (the 'guardian of the genome') must not have been directly mutated in the MCC tumor cells, meaning p53 wo...

This study presents a risk score model that predicts how well MCC patients will do and uses factors beyond ‘cancer stage’ by the standard American Joint Commission on Cancer (AJCC). These factors included male sex and immune compromise, as well as characteristics that are included in cancer stag...

Management of MCC and other skin cancers has been changing rapidly. The Society for Immune Therapy for Cancer (SITC) has tried to address this challenge by assembling a highly collaborative, multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team of clinicians that was led by Ann Silk & Isaac Brownell. Over th...

Merkel cell carcinoma that truly arises outside of the skin is incredibly rare. We have seen a few cases arising inside the nose but neuroendocrine cancers arising elsewhere in the body, away from skin, may not actually be "Merkel cell carcinoma". In this case arising in the lower gastro-intestinal ...

In addition to developing another 11 Merkel cell carcinoma cell lines for research, this team from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has helped unravel how MCC hides from the immune system. While it has been known for over a decade that MCC suppresses proteins called “HLA Class I” (necessary for the ...