Emerging Trends and Future Directions in Skin Cancer Management
Peleva E., Fionda B., Martínez-Monge R., Matin R., Kovács G., Harwood CA.
Recent advances in diagnosis and treatment are dramatically changing the management landscape for many non-melanoma skin cancers (NMSCs). Despite the impressive pace of change in some areas such as immunotherapy for treatment of advanced disease, there remain many critical unanswered clinical and scientific questions which have a direct impact on patient outcomes. In this chapter we consider aspects of these key areas and ongoing and potential future research initiatives designed to address them. With a particular focus on keratinocyte cancers, we consider prospects for improved epidemiological approaches to understanding the future burden of disease, advances in clinicopathological diagnosis and risk prediction, knowledge gaps in current medical and surgical treatments and advances in radiotherapy, including international data-sharing projects and brachytherapy. Although this is inevitably a highly selective synopsis, we aim to provide a glimpse of future directions which are likely to have a significant impact in the near future on optimising NMSC management and improving patient outcomes for these common human cancers.