Funding Successes
The number of people who were moved by Tara’s courage and her character is second only to the number of lives that will be forever changed by her legacy.
Through our partnership with the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the Tara Miller Melanoma Foundation (TMMF) has contributed to cutting-edge cancer research that directly benefits melanoma patients.
Read the foundation’s Annual impact report to see the results of your donations.
Taking Novel
Approaches
$2,263,000
19 cutting-edge projects funded to think outside the box and attack melanoma in innovative ways like using mRNA techonology to develop a melanoma vaccine, applying CAR T-cell technology to melanoma, developing new imaging tools to better track melanoma growth, and using state-of-the-art T-cell profiling developed at Penn to characterize how a patient’s T-cells match the nature of the melanoma tumor.
Predicting
Response
$1,400,000
12 projects that have changed the way physicians treat melanoma. This includes the groundbreaking published studies in which Tara’s own samples were used to determine how quickly patients respond to immunotherapy, a clinical trial offering those immunotherapy treatments to high risk stage 2 patients to prevent recurrence, and studying the impact of the microbiome on patients’ response to immunotherapy.
Understanding Melanoma Metastasis
$1,015,000
Nine projects funded to tackle the biggest obstacles in melanoma treatment. Researchers explored the unique cells of the brain and why they help melanoma cells grow, the impact of steroids on melanoma treatment efficacy, and how liquid biopsies can provide an early warning system before metastasis occurs.
Overcoming Resistance
$750,000
Eight projects funded to address one of the consistent challenges for melanoma patients undergoing treatment. Researchers developed a brand new “barcoding” technology to identify which cells become resistant and also discovering a common feature of resistant cells that can be targeted to overcome it.
Employing Combination Therapies
$425,000
Four projects funded to enhance patient response to therapy by pairing multiple therapies together to make them more effective and durable. In addition to combining multiple effective checkpoint inhibitors, researchers led a clinical trial adding radiation therapy to the drug combination and found that it jumpstarted the immune system and increased patient response.
Tara’s family and Abramson Cancer Center leadership at the official naming ceremony of the Tara Miller Melanoma Center.
Breakthrough Study
Targeted therapies, like those that target a BRAF mutation, often work initially but eventually stop being effective. Tara experienced this very challenge during her own treatment but, thanks to early support from TMMF, Dr. Arjun Raj, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Penn, and his team developed a tool called Rewind that identifies rare cells by using a DNA barcode to identify which ones become resistant to drug treatment. Once identified, scientists can then analyze features like the gene and protein expression of the cell to investigate why it became resistant. Melanoma patients are fortunate to have many more options today, but work like this will make such an important impact on patients who ultimately stop responding to available therapies. Overcoming resistance is critical to changing the odds for all melanoma patients.
This important breakthrough was published in Nature Biotechnology in February 2021.
“In reflecting on these past 10 years, the progress in melanoma treatment is beyond my imagination. We are truly changing the trajectory of the disease for an individual patient while at the same time learning new ways and finding new treatments that can benefit so many, many patients. Tara continues to galvanize our work every day to cure melanoma.”
$1,675,000 Funded to Melanoma Research Alliance Young Investigators
Every year, TMMF works with the MRA to identify influential melanoma research projects throughout the world. Since the foundation was started, four new therapies we have helped fund have been approved by the FDA. The impacts and benefits of melanoma research are felt broadly, with treatments and therapies developed for melanoma now used to treat over 30 different cancers. With more treatments being researched than ever before, this is truly an incredible moment in the fight against cancer. Learn more about our efforts in our latest research impact report.
Our funds go directly towards those projects, with the hopes of providing the money needed to continue their efforts to one day develop a cure. Each awardee received $225,000 towards their efforts.
2023 Team Science Award, (TBD based on February Grant Review)
2022 Inna Smalley, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, Tumor-Stroma Metabolic Crosstalk in Melano ma Brain Metastases
2021 Benjamin Izar, Columbia University, Dissecting the role of CD58 in cancer immune evasion and T-cell exclusion
2020 Michael Pacold, New York University School of Medicine, Targeting 1-Carbon Metabolism in Melanoma Brain Metastases
2019 Russell Jenkins, Massachusetts General Hospital, TANK-Binding Kinase 1 (TBK1) As A Novel Cancer Immunotherapy Target
2018 A. Hunter Shain, University of California, San Francisco, The Genomic Landscape of Individual Melanocytes from Human Skin
2017 Kunal Rai, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Epigenetic Effectors of Responses to Immune Checkpoint Blockade Agents
2016 Yuval Tabach, Hebrew University of Jersualem, Identification of Novel Regulators of Melanoma Brain Metastasis
2015 Tara (Gangadhar) Mitchell, University of Pennsylvania and Christina Twyman-Saint Victor, University of Pennsylvania, Radiation and Immune Checkpoint Blockade from Mechanism to Patients
“One of the hardest parts about having cancer is that you have no control over it; I cannot control how my body will respond, what my scans show or how to stop the disease from spreading. However, I can control how I chose to deal with these obstacles. I have chosen to find the #silverlinings and #makethbestofit and that is exactly what we hope to do with the Tara Miller Melanoma Foundation. Hopefully one day we will get to see the money raised by this Foundation making a difference in someone else’s fight against this terrible disease.”
-Tara Miller (2014)
Six years ago, we met one of those “someone else’s” that had a different outcome because of the research funded…
