Professor Mark Middleton

University of Oxford
Churchill Hospital
Oxford

Melanoma: cracking the code

Professor Mark Middleton is working on melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer. He is based at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford where he is running several clinical trials testing new ways to treat the disease.

People with melanoma are often treated successfully with surgery, but unfortunately in some cases the cancer can come back. Professor Middleton is trying to crack the code of melanoma and identify ‘molecular fingerprints’ in blood and tumour samples that will predict if a patient’s cancer is likely to return. This trial, called AVAST-M, is also investigating whether a drug called bevacizumab could help to reduce the risk of melanoma coming back after surgery, and identifying which patients could benefit from this treatment.

Professor Middleton’s work will help us to understand which patients have a high risk of their cancer returning, and who will get the most benefit from bevacizumab. This research could lead to a new test enabling doctors to prescribe bevacizumab only to those patients whose cancer will respond, while sparing others from an unnecessary treatment. Work like this is bringing us a step closer to more personalised treatments for melanoma, helping to save even more lives.

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