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Only a few months after she retired in October 2018, Lynn Walker knew something was wrong with her health. Without any prior history of skin cancers, she learned that she had an advanced form of melanoma that has spread all over her body.

“I was so sick and I felt awful before treatment,” says Walker. “I had no energy and lost so much weight.” Walker worried about the possibility of going through chemotherapy and not surviving the effects of cancer treatment, let alone melanoma. But she soon learned of another approach that held promise for her type of cancer: immunotherapy, a cancer treatment that triggers a person’s own immune system to kill the cancer cells within their body. “I had no idea there was another option until we came to Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI),” Walker says.

Since the late 1800s, doctors have known that the immune system is able to kill some cancer cells in diseases like melanoma. But the immune system can’t completely fight it off. Once melanoma has spread, it becomes very hard to treat. Major advances in the last 10 years using immunotherapy have changed that, leading to dramatic improvements in survival for some melanoma patient

“When we give chemotherapy or targeted therapy, we often have to use high doses of a drug — the higher the concentration, the higher likelihood that the drug is going to kill the cancer cells. They are the weapon for killing tumors. But more often than not, the concentration that a patient can tolerate is not enough to kill all of the cancer cells. In immunotherapy, however, drugs are not the weapon,” explains Dr. Siwen Hu-Lieskovan, MD, PhD, an HCI oncologist who cares for melanoma patients and an assistant professor of internal medicine at the . “In immunotherapy, we give the patient a stimulator that will wake up or unleash their immune cells to kill the tumor cells. The weapon is the patient’s own immune system.”