2025: Surgery for Melanoma – Its Present and Possible Future Roles
Associate Professor Alexander van Akkooi, Consultant Surgical Oncologist,
Melanoma Institute Australia
Professor Martin Gore CBE
About Professor Martin Gore CBE
Professor Martin Gore was a professor at the Institute of Cancer Research and a leading oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital. He tragically died after an allergic reaction to a Yellow-Fever vaccination on January 9th 2019, aged 67 years. He was an oncologist for more than 35 years, specialising in ovarian cancer, melanoma and renal cell carcinoma. He worked at The Royal Marsden Hospital for over 30 years and in 2006 he was appointed Medical Director; a role he held for 10 years. In 2015 he was awarded the The Royal Marsden’s Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2016 he was made CBE for his services to oncology. He was involved in many of the major clinical advances in melanoma systemic therapy. He was a past chairman of the Melanoma Study Group – a forerunner to Melanoma Focus. Prior to his death he was chairman of the group formed by Melanoma Focus to produce the UK clinical guidelines for ano-uro-genital mucosal melanoma.
He made a statement following its completion in 2018:
“As a rare and often lethal form of melanoma, without obvious risk factors and often identified only at an advanced stage, ano-uro-genital mucosal melanoma presents a major clinical challenge. With few randomised controlled trials on which to base our research, we relied on the large body of evidence that relates treatments to outcomes – interpreted through the skill and experience of the expert group formed to do this work.
We are confident that this new guideline will mark an improvement in the knowledge available to clinicians as well as patients. Hopefully it will also provide the healthcare community with authoritative recommendations for diagnosis, prognosis and treatment, while benefiting patients and carers by helping them understand the options open to them and what to expect.
Given the advances now being made in the field of cutaneous melanoma, it is timely that Melanoma Focus has funded this project to improve practical knowledge of this rare subset of the disease. I believe this guideline, which used NICE accredited methods, will be adopted as a standard in the UK as well as being influential internationally.
On behalf of the Guideline Group and the wider melanoma community, I want to thank Melanoma Focus and its Chief Executive Officer Simon Rodwell in particular, for giving us the practical support and encouragement to develop this guidance.’
The Martin Gore CBE Memorial Lecture
Dr Mark Harries, chairman of Melanoma Focus says: ‘Martin was an inspiration and a mentor to me and many other UK clinicians who work in the field of melanoma. He had fantastic clinical acumen, superb managerial skills, a phenomenal work ethic, and huge clinical research prowess; all combined with a brilliant bedside manner. He is much missed by his family, his patients and the melanoma community. I am proud that Melanoma Focus has initiated the annual Martin Gore Memorial Award to honour him.’
The Professor Martin Gore CBE Memorial Lecture was set up in 2020 to honour the outstanding work carried out during Professor Gore’s career and to highlight the impact he has, and will continue to have, on generations in the field of melanoma.
With gratitude to Professor Gore’s family, the Memorial Lecture is delivered by an eminent speaker at our annual Focus on Melanoma healthcare professional educational meetings.
Please see below details of the Professor Martin Gore CBE Memorial Lecture recipients and titles of their presentations:
Past Lectures
2024: From Bench to Bedside and Back: What we Have Learned and What we are Still Missing
Professor Dirk Schadendorf, Director and Chair, Department of Dermatology & Director, Comprehensive Cancer Center, University Hospital Essen, Germany
2023: Multidisciplinary Management of Melanoma: Past, Present, and Future
Professor Charles Balch, Department of Surgical Oncology – Research, Division of Surgery, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas
2022: How Treatments Have Changed and Continued to Evolve
Professor Claus Garbe – Head of Division of Dermato-oncology at Eberhard Karls
University, Tuebingen and President European Association for Dermatology-Oncology
2021: Towards Zero Deaths from Melanoma
Professor Georgina Long – Co-Medical Director/Chair of Melanoma Medical Oncology & Translational Research, Melanoma Institute of Australia/Royal North Shore Hospital, The University of Sydney
2020: The Mathematics of Tumour Growth and Metastasis
Professor Helen Byrne – Professor of Computational Biology, University of Oxford
