MelaFind's Clinical Trial Shows Promising Results

Sept. 27, 2009— -- Skin cancer survivor Kim Hunt visits her dermatologist four times a year for quarterly cancer screenings to ensure she is still cancer-free.

Hunt, 36, a business-development consultant from Secaucus, N.J., wants to take no chances. She once had a melanoma , one of the fastest-growing forms of cancer, striking more than 68,000 Americans each year, according to the American Cancer Society.

And because she has had one melanoma, Hunt -- like all melanoma patients -- is at a higher risk of developing another one.

Despite its ubiquity, skin cancer can be notoriously difficult to detect.

If caught early, melanomas are almost 100 percent survivable. But if left untreated, a melanoma is a virtual death sentence.

"Research shows doctors can pick up melanomas accurately only two-thirds of the time," says Dr. Ellen Marmur, chief of dermatological surgery at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City. "That means we're missing a third of melanomas every time we see a patient."

An experimental medical device, known as MelaFind, is designed to take the guesswork out of melanoma detection. It's a hand-held imaging gun and a computer developed by a small Irvington, N.Y., medical company, Electro-Optical Sciences.

MelaFind uses a digital camera to record suspect skin patches in 10 different bands of light, including a deep probing infrared beam that examines cells below the skin's surface. The collected images are sent to a computer and compared against thousands of malignant and benign skin images, determining in seconds whether skin cancer is likely and eliminating the need for painful, scarring biopsies.

This pattern-recognition technology was originally developed by the Department of Defense for use in spy satellites to distinguish potential military targets from civilian objects.

In a clinical trial at seven locations across the U.S. last February, researchers used MelaFind to study more than 1,800 skin lesions from 1,300 patients, finding that MelaFind's ability to accurately rule out skin cancer was 2.5 times greater than that of dermatologists.

FDA Will Soon Decide Whether to Recommend Procedure

The new photo technology accurately detected 98.3 percent of melanomas and reduced unnecessary biopsies by 90 percent, says Dr. Darrell Rigel of the New York University School of Medicine and a consultant for Electro-Optical.

The results were considered so promising that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is working to have a decision on MelaFind's efficacy in the next six months. An FDA advisory panel is expected to meet shortly to consider whether to recommend the procedure.

As for cancer survivor Hunt, she will continue her cancer screenings, but is hopeful this new technology will help skin cancer patients like herself breathe easier.

She said, "Anything that would be able to help my doctor more accurately detect melanoma, I would be the first one in line to try it out."