The National Cancer Institute has awarded special project grants to Yale surgeons Drs. James Clune and Kelly Olino for their research in rare skin cancers and personalized therapies. The $50,000 grants are funded through the NCI’s Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) initiative, which aims to promote collaborative, interdisciplinary translational cancer research.
Dr. Clune’s SPORE will support his study entitled “Defining the Tumor Microenvironment for Desmoplastic Melanoma.” Dr. Olino’s grant is focused on is focused on "Defining the Tumor Microenvironment of Merkel Cell Carcinoma."
The synergy is not a coincidence. Dr. Clune and Dr. Olino have partnered to build a destination program at Yale that takes a multi-disciplinary approach to melanoma, combining Dr. Olino’s expertise as a surgical oncologist, with Dr. Clune’s background as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon.
The program provides melanoma patients with comprehensive surgical care, including advanced and personalized techniques in the surgical resection and reconstruction of metastatic and rare skin cancers.
“We don’t have a great staging system for desmoplastic melanoma or merkel cell carcinoma, and traditional prognostic factors are unreliable in this group of patients,” said Dr. Clune.
“The goal of our research is to determine which markers might predict clinical course, and possibly predict responses to targeted therapies and immunotherapies for these different skin cancers,” said Dr. Olino.
Drs. Clune and Olino treat patients from across the country, at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New Haven, and Guilford, Connecticut.