Richard Scolyer

It may not be quite 0%, but we definitely will keep making progress and get very close to that.

And indeed, I think ultimately we'll get to a stage where we'll get to zero deaths from all cancers, I hope.

And if we talk about the progress, it was only 10 or so years, 15 years ago, that five-year survival rate for melanoma

for advanced stage when it was spread around your body was less than 5%.

Now it's 57%.

So that's a big jump.

Yeah, with the treatments done by medical oncologists, there's a team of people that are working together.

So what is immunotherapy and how does it work?

So compared to chemotherapy, where chemotherapy is basically poisoning all cells in your body, but hopefully having more of an effect on the cancer cells, there's side effects associated with it.

But one of the types of cells that it's suppressing is the immune system.

And we know, in fact, that many people are developing cancers that the body's immune system recognizes and kills off before anyone knows that it ever happened.

But what happens is your cancer, some cancers can hide themselves from the immune system.

They build up shields around themselves.

And whilst they're still growing, the immune system can't get in to kill them off.

And these new treatments, immunotherapy, basically break down those barriers to allow the immune system to recognize the cancer cells and to kill them off.

And that's why it's so exciting.

It's made incredible differences in melanoma and also now in many other cancers.

It's used an improved outlook.

But the one thing that's really been a game changer that's just come out in our melanoma work is what's called pre-surgery or neoadjuvant immunotherapy.

And that is if you give the immunotherapy when there's more tumour on board, for