By Cassandra Willyard

When a doctor spots a cancerous skin growth, simple surgery is often sufficient to rid the patient of cancer. Once melanoma has spread throughout the body, however, few treatment options exist. Neither chemotherapy nor the immune protein interleukin-2—the two therapies currently approved for treating metastatic melanoma—offer much hope. But a new generation of melanoma drugs nearing approval that target a common mutation implicated in driving tumor growth could revolutionize the way physicians treat skin cancer.

These new drugs target a mutated form of the B-RAF oncoprotein, and cancer specialists say they represent a major improvement over existing therapies, which suffer from low response rates and fail to significantly extend survival. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” says Lynn Schuchter, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia who is involved in trials to test the new compounds and has been treating patients with metastatic melanoma, the deadliest form of the disease, for almost 25 years. “We really have tears of joy.”

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Image of melanoma, National Cancer Institute