Melanoma Care - Mayo Clinic

Many people with melanoma are diagnosed at Stages 0, 1 or 2, and their treatment is focused on removing cancerous cells with surgery. At Mayo Clinic, your surgical team offers treatment at all stages including advanced procedures to meet your individual needs.

Our surgical experts perform aesthetic and functionally exceptional oncoplastic closures as part of our skin and soft tissue surgery to maximize both function and appearance after surgery. Our surgeons also perform lymphatic mapping and sentinel lymph node surgery if there is a risk your cancer has spread to your lymph nodes. If necessary, your team can perform therapeutic lymph node dissections with venous preservation and incision placement designed to promote faster healing and minimize long-term side effects of treatment such as lymphedema.

Melanoma experts at Mayo Clinic also manage stage 3 and 4 disease with advanced diagnostics and clinical expertise. For many people with these metastatic diagnoses, systemic therapy – or therapy applied throughout the body – is necessary.

Your care team will work quickly and collaboratively to understand your cancer and provide you the best treatment options available. You'll have access to therapies including:

Ablative therapies such as radiation therapy or intralesional treatments
Immunotherapy that harnesses your own body to fight cancer
Targeted therapy that uses medications to target specific genetic changes in your tumor.
Clinical trials that offer patients the opportunity to take advantage of the latest advances in melanoma therapies

Mayo Clinic can also offer emerging therapies that many other centers do not offer including, intralesional (local injection) therapies such as T-VEC, which is an immunotherapy targeted specifically toward melanoma, and medical treatment for melanoma in the eye, also called uveal melanoma.

As part of a renowned health care system, melanoma experts at Mayo Clinic work alongside world-class colleagues in research, pathology, surgical oncology, medical oncology, dermatology, diagnostic and interventional radiology and radiation oncology to provide a wholistic, multidisciplinary approach to your care plan. We treat patients with melanoma every day, so you can trust you are in experienced hands. Your team will take the time to get to know you, your cancer and your goals to provide treatment options that make the most sense for you and minimize potential side effects.

Melanoma care at Mayo Clinic is provided by dermatologists, medical oncologists, radiation oncologists and surgical oncologists who work collaboratively within Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center. The Cancer Center is a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center. Mayo Clinic in Rochester is ranked #1 for best hospitals in the nation by the U.S. News and World Report best hospitals rankings, and consistently ranks among the top hospitals for cancer.

Treatment of Melanoma at Mayo Clinic

Patients with melanoma of all stages from early to late can really benefit from care here at Mayo Clinic. Individualizing care is really important and really considering the whole patient. And that is something that we're really adept at. We have a nice culture of innovation where people come together and they have this sort of win-win mentality and they wanted to really build something new for patients. We're really fortunate here to have this multi-disciplinary integrated clinical and research practice with access to the latest treatments, clinical trials that are testing what we know to be the best against, what may actually be better and perhaps less toxic to patients. Adopting ways of being more precise in our care for patients. When we meet patients, they get a full skin exam. We'll get everything from head to toe and make sure we're not missing anything, but initial pathology is what really determines the first steps in treatment. After that, you meet with a surgeon when we talk about the options for surgery, and that's usually the first step in treatment for melanoma is surgery.

Here we have surgeons who are really specialized and have a lot of expertise in doing melanoma surgery and doing it in a way that minimizes short-term complications and improves the cosmetic or aesthetic outcomes of surgery. We recommend a procedure we call a wide local excision, which means we cut around the biopsy site, but we go a little deeper than usual. We take out all the fat tissue we go down to the so-called fascia of the muscles. We go deep, that's the minimum amount of surgery that we think people should get if they have a melanoma, then the question is, do we need to do more than that? Do we need to take out lymphatic tissue for example. We have adopted technical advances in the practice such as minimally invasive techniques, vein preserving techniques that we know really improve long term outcomes and other methods that we have for decreasing complications of surgery in the short term. With a real attention to technical advances and care. Intralesional therapy is a way to target specific lesions as they develop in the skin. So we'd harnessed the body's immune system to attack those lesions. And so we can often, for patients with advanced melanoma that's spreading through the skin or through the tissues are right below the skin or through the lymph nodes. We can inject that with therapies that help the body attack the melanoma. And it not only attacks those lesions, but hopefully attacks other melanoma developing in the body. A melanoma diagnosis is never the end of the road. We have such good options, whether it's early stage melanoma, we have really good medical options for even late-stage melanoma that we haven't had until recent years. So for every single patient, there's hope.

Expert Melanoma Care at all Stages

Advanced treatment for your unique diagnosis.

Surgical expertise for the best possible outcomes.

Comprehensive care for advanced diagnoses.

Treatment of Melanoma at Mayo Clinic

When it's time to find answers, you know where to go.

Contact us to request an appointment.

Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center is designated by the National Cancer Institute as a comprehensive cancer center.

Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center is nationally accredited by the American College of Surgeons' Commission on Cancer (CoC).