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Driving innovation in melanoma treatments

Thursday, 07 August 2025

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  • Image of Dr Beasley accepting a grant award at a ceremony

    Dr Aaron Beasley

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Dr Aaron Beasley leads the cancer genomics research group in ECU's Centre for Precision Health.

As a young man, Aaron’s father was diagnosed with late-stage melanoma and after dabbling in a range of non-medical careers, he decided to devote his professional life to improving outcomes for cancer patients. Currently combination immunotherapy is the gold standard melanoma treatment for those facing late-stage melanoma and in reality, only 50% of patients will respond.

While melanoma rates have remained relatively stable in Australia recently, the survival rates of those with late-stage melanoma five years on from diagnosis have seen an improvement from under 10% to more than 50% – an improvement Dr Beasley puts down to the use of immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Aaron's goal is to "get the right treatment to the right patient at the right time". His research project focuses on using a blood liquid biopsy to determine if a person with late-stage melanoma is going to respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors.  It is critical, he says, to more accurately predict the non-responders as those patients could then be moved into other more promising clinical trials in an effort to improve their chances of survival. It also prevents patients from undergoing toxic therapies that are very likely to be unsuccessful. There may be other treatments or clinical trials that would be much more beneficial.

As a researcher, Dr Beasley says that funding is all researchers’ primary barrier. “While funding is always an ongoing challenge, we have not had much issue with recruitment for this project,” he said.

“We are always amazed and extremely thankful for the generosity of patients to donate their time, blood, and tissue sample to research, even if this may not benefit them directly, these samples have the potential to help others in the community.”

He said supporting medical research is extremely important as a driver to improve survival rates of those facing cancer and other chronic diseases.

“In general, cancer prognosis/survival has significantly improved from even 10 years ago and this is primarily driven by generous donations, both financial and biological, from the broader community.”

While most of his work is either laboratory or computer based, he said he has had the privilege of meeting many melanoma patients at community events including research discussions and fundraising.

Dr Beasley described personalised medicine as the future of cancer treatment.

While he is focused on more effective treatment and survival rates for those with late-stage melanoma, he said prevention and early intervention (while melanoma is contained to the skin) is certainly the best option.

“I believe we will see melanoma become a completely curable disease, and this will involve giving the right patient the right treatment at the right time based on clinically actionable biomarkers.”

Dr Beasley's research project is funded by Austal Ships via the Hospital Research Foundation Group.

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