It is expected that over a million Americans will be diagnosed with skin cancer in 2008. This deadly disease is quite easy to treat in its early stages, however if tumors go unnoticed, up until now there has been nothing that can be done to increase survival rates. A new use of immunotherapy in fighting skin cancer has recently been used with startling, although isolated success -a man in Oregon seems to be living proof of a skin cancer cure.

Skin cancer is most often caused by prolonged exposure to UV light -sunlight -without adequate protection. We have been told to slip, slop and slap for many decades now (Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat), however, there are still quite large numbers of people being diagnosed with skin cancer. It is the most commonly diagnosed malignancy, with greater numbers of people diagnosed with skin cancer than either breast, lung, colorectal or prostate cancer. While cancers are generally easy to identify, if they occur on a part of the body which is generally not viewed (the back, for example), skin cancer can turn fatal, and usually do not respond to cancer therapies such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Cancer has been such a plague on the medical industry because it has always been thought that the body does not recognize cancerous cells as foreign bodies (and treat them as such, by attacking them), because they are formed from the body's own tissue. However, in the case of skin cancer, it was discovered in last century that some immune cells could latch onto and destroy cancer cells, curing skin cancer. The man in Oregon is the first person known to medicine to beat melanoma once it has spread to other areas of the body.

This man had a melanoma on his back, before it spread to his right lung and his groin. He was treated in July 2005 with the revolutionary process described below. Two months after receiving the treatment, there were no tumors in his body as revealed by advanced scans. What is more important is that 2 years later, he still had no tumors -and also no symptoms of cancer.

Researchers have recently focused on revving up T-cells, which are important also in the fight against leukemia. These cells envelop and kill foreign agents in the body. Researchers took blood from the patients, isolated the helper t-cells which locate and destroy foreign entities, and cultured more of them in the laboratory. When there were roughly 5 billion of the cells, they were injected back into the patients. This t-cell therapy was traditionally given in conjunction with traditional cancer therapies such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, however in the research which yielded a cure for skin cancer for one man, this immunotherapy was given alone.

However, further research is needed to determine the exact mechanism by which this was able to work so well. There were eight other patients involved in the immunotherapy study looking for a skin cancer cure, and none of the other patients have had such a degree of remission as this man. He has also fallen out of touch with researchers, and is not interested in being interviewed by the media.

With further research, it could be possible that we will have a cure for skin cancer in the near future.