Since our founding in 2007, the Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA) has taken a bold, global approach to driving our mission of ending suffering and death due to melanoma. We know that melanoma is not bound by borders — and neither is research. MRA’s commitment to collaboration means funding the world’s brightest scientists — regardless of where they work — to accelerate discoveries and drive breakthroughs from the lab to the clinic.
Through our transformative, strategic, and collaborative grant mechanisms, MRA has invested more than $175 million to support over 500 projects at 165 institutions across 19 countries. This global investment is helping to identify new therapeutic targets, uncover mechanisms of treatment resistance, develop better diagnostic tools, and advance innovative treatment strategies that improve outcomes for melanoma patients worldwide.
The investigators highlighted here — representing Australia, Germany, and the UK — embody the spirit of global collaboration and innovation at the heart of MRA’s mission.
Professor Richard Scolyer AO (Officer of the Order of Australia) of the Melanoma Institute Australia is one of the world’s foremost melanoma pathologists and a global leader in bridging laboratory science with patient care. His research has transformed how melanoma is diagnosed and staged, helping to set international standards that assist how clinicians care for patients around the globe.
In 2020, Dr. Scolyer and a multidisciplinary team spanning Australia’s leading research institutions received an MRA Team Science Award for their project, Effective Therapies for Patients with High-Risk In-Transit Disease. In-transit metastases (ITM) is a challenging form of early melanoma metastasis that affects around 10% of patients and is associated with high recurrence and mortality rates.
Supported by MRA, the team performed comprehensive multi-omic profiling of in-transit melanoma lesions from patients treated with surgery alone. By integrating whole genome sequencing, RNA sequencing, and spatial immune profiling, they were able to distinguish patients likely to experience recurrence from those cured by surgery — a major step toward predicting who might benefit from additional treatment.
In a separate cohort of patients treated with adjuvant anti–PD-1 immunotherapy, the team applied the same multi-omic approach — plus newer state-of-the-art technologies — to map the tumor microenvironment at unprecedented resolution. This revealed key mechanisms of resistance, including novel immune escape pathways and actionable drug targets, as well as the critical role of immune–tumor cell proximity in determining therapeutic response. These insights are now being applied in a prospective non-interventional clinical trial, PIP-PREDICT (NCT06536257). The study will evaluate the documentation, processes, accuracy and utility of the predictive biomarker model in clinical practice to eventually guide more personalized treatment selection for advanced melanoma patients inclusive of different subtypes.
The project’s impact has been far reaching. It has trained multiple early-career investigators, supported PhD theses, led to several publications, and created infrastructure that will continue to benefit melanoma research well beyond the grant period.
Said Associate Professor and co-researcher, James Wilmott:
“These investments create lasting infrastructure and networks that benefit the broader research community and train the next generation of leaders, an impact which continues well beyond the initial funding.”
“The team continues to work together, expanding our research and building new international networks with other MRA funded Team Science Award recipients to combine knowledge to impact patient care.”
Dr. Tobias Bald, Professor of Tumor Immunobiology at the Institute of Experimental Oncology at the University Hospital Bonn, Germany, leads a pioneering research program focused on how immune cells — particularly T cells and natural killer (NK) cells — interact with the tumor microenvironment and influence the success of cancer immunotherapies. His team investigates mechanisms of resistance to today’s immunotherapies, with a special emphasis on the CD226 pathway, a critical regulator of T cell activity and a key mechanism exploited by tumors to evade the immune system.
Building on these insights, Dr. Bald’s lab is developing next-generation cellular therapies, including CAR-T and NK cell–based platforms, and leveraging advanced technologies such as nanobody engineering and AI-driven protein design. “Our ultimate goal is to translate fundamental discoveries into therapies that can improve outcomes for patients with solid tumors, such as melanoma, where more effective immunotherapies are still urgently needed,” he explains.
Dr. Bald’s work received a major boost in 2021 through the Young Investigator Award for his project Loss of CD226 in T cells drives resistance to melanoma immunotherapy, which provided critical resources and recognition at a pivotal moment in his career. “The award connected me to MRA’s fantastic global network of scientists, clinicians, and patient advocates,” he shared. “These interactions have been invaluable — broadening my perspective, shaping the translational focus of my research, and reinforcing the urgency of developing new therapeutic strategies that can truly make a difference for patients.” The award also contributed to him receiving the prestigious Lisec Artz Award, which honors outstanding young scientists in cancer research in Germany, further highlighting the importance and impact of this line of research.
Since receiving the MRA Young Investigator Award, Dr. Bald has presented his findings at major international conferences, including the European Association of Dermato-Oncology (EADO) Congress, Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dermatologische Forschung (Working Group for Dermatological Research) and MRA’s Annual Scientific Retreat. His team is currently in the process of preparing publications to share the lab’s latest discoveries and has secured additional national and international funding to further advance their research.
“These investments in early career researchers bring fresh perspectives into the field, accelerate the translation of discoveries into clinical applications, and ensure a continuous pipeline of innovation."
“For melanoma research in particular, this support is critical to sustaining progress and ultimately delivering better outcomes for patients,” he said. By combining fundamental immunology with a focus on translational research, his team is working to bring the next generation of immunotherapies closer to patients who need them most.
Dr. Samra Turajlic, Group Leader of the Cancer Dynamics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute and Director of the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Manchester Institute, is a global leader in applying evolutionary biology to cancer medicine.
Dr. Turajlic’s pioneering multidisciplinary team — comprising cancer geneticists, computational biologists, mathematicians, clinician scientists, pathologists, and radiologists — uses whole-genome and single-cell sequencing, spatial technologies, and modeling to trace tumor evolution. By uncovering how genetic and environmental factors drive metastasis and influence treatment resistance, her lab aims to predict tumor behavior and tailor treatments before resistance occurs.
In 2020, Dr. Turajlic received the MRA Team Science Award, supported by the Rosetrees Trust, for her project Investigating Melanoma Metastases. The award enabled her team to establish and expand the landmark PEACE (Posthumous Evaluation of Advanced Cancer Environment) study — creating the most comprehensive dataset of metastatic melanoma evolution assembled to date. Through this effort, the team has profiled more than 570 tumor samples from immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI)-treated patients with cutaneous, acral, and mucosal melanoma, and over 450 tumor samples from patients with uveal melanoma, including some treated with the novel therapy tebentafusp.
This unprecedented dataset revealed that metastatic melanoma can arise through multiple evolutionary pathways, polyclonal seeding patterns (how cancer cells seed new metastases), and long periods of tumor dormancy, particularly in brain metastases. These findings, published in Cancer Discovery (Spain et al., 2023), reshaped understanding of how melanoma spreads and highlighted potential windows for therapeutic intervention. The team continues to build on this work through the UK-wide MANIFEST initiative — an ambitious multi-omic platform for biomarker discovery in cancer immunotherapy
(Lim et al., 2025).
“The MRA Team Science Award represented more than funding — it validated our belief that evolutionary principles could transform how we study and treat melanoma.”
“Perhaps, most importantly, this award provided the resources and confidence to pursue ambitious, high-risk research questions that have since defined our lab's trajectory.”
Dr. Turajlic’s findings have been featured at major international scientific meetings and continue to influence how scientists think about tumor evolution and therapeutic resistance. Her team’s collaborative, patient-centered approach embodies the spirit of MRA’s mission — bridging discovery and clinical impact through global collaboration.
