As a highly aggressive cancer, melanoma requires exceptional skill and training for successful treatment. When you come to Penn Medicine, you’re in expert hands with our melanoma specialists.
Your care team includes surgeons, doctors and other providers with years of experience treating even the most complex melanoma cases. At the Abramson Cancer Center, you have more options available to you than ever before.
Melanoma Treatments: The Penn Medicine Advantage
As part of the Abramson Cancer Center, the Tara Miller Melanoma Center provides specialized care for all types of melanoma. We offer:
- Comprehensive, personalized treatments: We offer all available treatment options for melanoma, such as surgery, Mohs surgery, immunotherapy and targeted therapy. Many of these treatments can provide a cure. Our thorough melanoma diagnosis process includes sophisticated biopsy techniques and appropriate tumor mutation testing. Based on those details, we work closely with you to tailor a treatment plan for your unique needs.
- Specialized expertise in melanoma: Our doctors have advanced training in oncology (cancer care), dermatology, pathology (disease diagnosis), surgery and other fields. Our nurse practitioners and physician assistants have specialized oncology training and years of focused experience with the team. We take a multidisciplinary approach to your care, working together to decide how best to combine your treatments. Meet your melanoma and skin cancer team.
- Groundbreaking research and clinical trials: Our melanoma specialists lead their fields in research and patient care. We offer many clinical trials available only at Penn. You have access to promising new prevention methods, diagnostic tools, surgical techniques, targeted therapies and immunotherapy. Learn more about our research and clinical trials at the Tara Miller Melanoma Center.
- Emphasis on prevention and screening: Your care team counsels you on effective ways to help prevent or reduce the risk of melanoma. Our team offers a free, annual skin cancer screening and an annual melanoma conference, both for the community. Our specialists frequently speak at local support groups for people with a higher risk of melanoma, such as organ transplant recipients.
The program also offers whole-body photography to document and track skin changes. At Penn Medicine, we emphasize patient education and monitoring so that melanoma can be prevented, discovered and diagnosed early.
Melanoma Treatment Options
Your care team tailors your treatment plan for melanoma based on the type, size, location and stage of the tumor and other factors. Depending on your specific case, you might need more than one type of treatment.
Surgery for Melanoma
Surgery is the first treatment for most types of melanoma, especially melanoma skin cancer. We’re experienced in precise techniques that remove melanoma tumors as completely as possible while minimizing the effects on your body. Learn more about your options for melanoma surgery, including excision, sentinel lymph node biopsy and Mohs micrographic surgery for melanoma.
Immunotherapy for Melanoma
Immunotherapy is cancer medication that boosts your immune system’s ability to destroy cancer cells. At Penn, our medical oncologists (specialists in treating cancer with medications) use immunotherapy to slow or stop the spread of melanoma.
Our specialists are also involved in ongoing research on new, effective ways to use immunotherapy in melanoma treatment. Find out more about immunotherapy for melanoma.
Targeted Therapy for Melanoma
Targeted therapies are medications that identify and attack specific substances on cancer cells without harming healthy cells. The targeted substances include certain proteins with gene mutations (changes) that control cell growth and death.
Our medical oncologists and their teams carefully evaluate you to decide whether targeted therapy could help you, based on a tumor’s genetic details. Learn more about targeted therapy for melanoma.
Radiation Therapy for Melanoma
Radiation therapy uses high-energy beams, such as X-ray radiation, to damage cancer cells and prevent them from growing and spreading. Radiation therapy for melanoma can be:
- Internal: With brachytherapy, our radiation oncologists place tiny sources of radioactive material in or near a tumor. The material slowly releases radiation over a period of time, such as a few days or longer, depending on the specific cancer.
- External: We specialize in several types of external beam radiation therapy, which uses machines outside the body to direct radiation beams to tumors.
Our radiation oncologists have specialized training and experience in all types of radiation therapy for melanoma. We work closely with the rest of the team to include radiation as appropriate for your customized treatment plan.
The types of radiation therapy that we most often use to treat melanoma include:
- Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT): IMRT conforms external beam radiation to the tumor’s size and shape. We use IMRT for a variety of melanoma types, including melanoma on the skin in the head and neck region and mucosal melanoma. Some patients have IMRT after surgery or for tumors that surgery cannot remove. We also combine IMRT with one or more types of immunotherapy for people with advanced melanoma skin cancer.
- Proton therapy: This external therapy uses proton beams as the radiation source. Proton beams release their energy within the tumor, with only a small dose of radiation outside the tumor site. Doctors can tightly control proton beams and target them precisely to the tissue being treated, to better spare normal tissue. Similar to IMRT, we use proton therapy after surgery to treat skin melanoma and mucosal melanomas near critical structures in the head and neck.
- Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS): SRS, often referred to as Gamma Knife®, is highly targeted radiation of tumors within the brain. SRS uses hundreds of beams that all converge on the tumor. It is typically a one-day outpatient procedure for people who have melanoma that has spread to the brain.
- Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT): SBRT is highly focal radiation, very similar to SRS. We use SBRT to treat melanoma outside the brain. SBRT is usually delivered over a period of one to five treatment sessions.
Chemotherapy for Melanoma
Chemotherapy is medication that travels through the bloodstream to destroy cancer cells anywhere in the body (systemic treatment). Chemotherapy can be:
- Infusion: You receive chemotherapy intravenously (into a vein).
- Injection: We inject chemotherapy medications directly into a tumor.
- Pill: You take the chemotherapy medication by mouth.
For melanoma, we more often use immunotherapy and targeted therapy, which work better than chemotherapy for many melanomas. Chemotherapy can help in certain situations, such as:
- Metastatic melanoma: Chemotherapy can help shrink melanoma tumors that have spread to distant areas of the body.
- Advanced melanoma: Isolated limb perfusion (ILP) and isolated limb infusion (ILI) are chemotherapy treatments for melanoma in an arm or leg. ILP and ILI treat stage 3 melanoma, which has spread outside its original site but not to distant areas. During these procedures, your surgeon separates the limb’s blood flow from the rest of the body. We circulate a high dose of chemotherapy only through the limb. ILP and ILI treat the area of the tumor without exposing the rest of the body to chemotherapy.
Laser Therapy for Melanoma
Laser therapy uses a focused beam of infrared light to heat and destroy ocular melanoma tumors. Our melanoma team uses laser treatment, or transpupillary thermotherapy, alone or after brachytherapy to help prevent cancer from returning.
Cancer Support Services for You and Your Family
The Abramson Cancer Center offers services and therapies to help you and your family during melanoma treatment. Learn more about our patient and family support services.
Request an Appointment
Call 800-789-7366 to schedule an appointment with one of our melanoma experts. You can also request an appointment using our online form.