FORT WASHINGTON, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Despite recent treatment advances, melanoma remains the most serious form of skin cancer and the leading cause of death from skin disease, attributing to approximately 70,000 diagnoses each year. To provide people with melanoma and their caregivers with state-of-the-art treatment information in patient-friendly language, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) has developed an updated version of the NCCN Guidelines for Patients™: Melanoma. Included in this 2011 Version is information about vemurafenib (Zelboraf®, Genentech), a targeted therapy recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of metastatic melanoma, and ipilimumab (Yervoy™, Bristol-Myers Squibb), an immunotherapy also recently approved by the FDA for advanced melanoma.
The NCCN Guidelines for Patients are consumer-friendly translations of the professional NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines®), which physicians around the globe use when determining appropriate cancer treatment. The NCCN Guidelines for Patients present the same information that physicians use when making treatment decisions in an easy-to-understand format for people with cancer.
The updated NCCN Guidelines for Patients: Melanoma is available free of charge both on-line at NCCN.com and NCCN.org and in print booklet format. To request a hard copy of this resource, e-mail patientguidelines@nccn.org.
Through the support of the NCCN Foundation, NCCN offers a library of NCCN Guidelines for Patients including those on breast, non-small cell lung, ovarian, and prostate cancers, chronic myelogenous leukemia, malignant pleural mesothelioma, and multiple myeloma. All of these Guidelines are available free of charge at NCCN.com, which also features informative articles for patients and caregivers. These guidelines are also featured on NCCN.org.
About the National Comprehensive Cancer Network
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®), a not-for-profit alliance of 21 of the world’s leading cancer centers, is dedicated to improving the quality and effectiveness of care provided to patients with cancer. Through the leadership and expertise of clinical professionals at NCCN Member Institutions, NCCN develops resources that present valuable information to the numerous stakeholders in the health care delivery system. As the arbiter of high-quality cancer care, NCCN promotes the importance of continuous quality improvement and recognizes the significance of creating clinical practice guidelines appropriate for use by patients, clinicians, and other health care decision-makers. The primary goal of all NCCN initiatives is to improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of oncology practice so patients can live better lives.
The NCCN Member Institutions are: City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, Los Angeles, CA; Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center | Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, MA; Duke Cancer Institute, Durham, NC; Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA; Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center/Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Seattle, WA; The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, MD; Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, Chicago, IL; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY; H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, Tampa, FL; The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute, Columbus, OH; Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY; Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital/University of Tennessee Cancer Institute, Memphis, TN; Stanford Cancer Institute, Stanford, CA; University of Alabama at Birmingham Comprehensive Cancer Center, Birmingham, AL; UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, San Francisco, CA; University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ann Arbor, MI; UNMC Eppley Cancer Center at The Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE; The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX; and Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Nashville, TN.
Clinicians, visit NCCN.org. Patients and caregivers, visit NCCN.com.