Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Alex Meves, distinguished dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic and a spokesperson for SkylineDx, discusses the challenges in diagnosing and treating melanoma and how a new molecular test called Merlin can help improve risk stratification and treatment decisions for patients with early-stage melanoma. Diagnosis and treatment have traditionally used tumor thickness as a primary risk factor. This molecular test measures the expression of genes in the tumor biopsy and can help determine the extent of surgery needed and whether additional therapies may be beneficial. Alex explains, "My department, when I started to work here at Mayo, wanted me to do some translational research, and I had just come back from a postdoc in Germany, at the Max Planck Institute, and I was tasked to get some research going. And so I focused on melanoma because I thought at the time there wasn't a lot of molecular research going on in melanoma that could be translated to patients. And so we started to develop biomarkers, sort of molecul