To mark the start of Melanoma Awareness Month, the Melanoma Research Alliance has announced thirty-four grants totaling more than $8.5 million to researchers working to advance the understanding of and treatment for the disease.

Grants were awarded to twenty-eight institutions in six countries — Australia, Belgium, Israel, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States — working to develop new therapeutic approaches to melanoma, optimize the use of existing drugs, and better understand how the skin cancer forms. The fourteen recipients of the 2017 Established Investigator Awards include Boris Bastian (University of California, San Francisco), who will work to identify DNA-based biomarkers for melanoma diagnosis and prognostication, while the fourteen recipients of Young Investigator Awards include Manuel Valiente (Fundacion Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncologicas Carlos III, Spain), who will investigate actionable targets with the potential to lead to the more efficient design of anti-cancer treatments for patients with metastatic melanoma of the brain. The five recipients of the Pilot Awards include Mark Shackleton (University of Melbourne, Australia), who is working to better characterize how pigmentation affects melanoma development and progression. In addition, the alliance awarded its Academic-Industry Partnership Award to Richard Carvajal (Columbia University Medical Center) and industry partner Immunocore for a study that will provide, among other things, an international registry of overall survival data for uveal melanoma patients.

This year's awards bring to $88 million the organization's total grantmaking since it was founded a decade ago.

"What's exciting about these latest awards is the scope of innovation and calculated risk to advance the field," said Louise M. Perkins, chief science officer at the alliance. "Fresh perspectives from senior and young melanoma investigators as well as insights from astrophysicists, materials scientists, and others new to the field are converging to drive pivotal advances in the prevention and diagnosis of melanoma and continue to build on our momentum of unlocking the most favorable treatments."

For a complete list of grant recipients, see the MRA website.