The Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA), the world’s largest private nonprofit funder of melanoma research, has announced its biggest annual global investment to date. MRA splurged $18.4 million on 30 discovery-stage research grants across the US amid rising occurrences of drug resistance.
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Investing at the frontier of detection and treatment
MRA’s investment spanned five strategic areas, including rare melanomas, metastasis and central nervous system spread, therapeutic optimization, immune response innovation, and diagnostics and biomarkers. The latest investment also advances two critical infrastructure initiatives, the RARE Melanoma Research Consortium and the Melanoma Biorepository, designed to unlock insights into the most complex and underserved forms of the disease.
New melanoma cases in the US are expected to increase by 10.6% in 2026, with an estimated 234,680 diagnoses and 8,510 deaths projected for the year. In the past decade, the number of new invasive melanoma cases diagnosed annually increased by 46.6%.
Despite that trajectory, death rates have been falling by roughly 2.2% per year, a decline MRA attributes directly to the research investments it and the broader melanoma community have sustained since 2007.
Since its founding, MRA-funded investigators have contributed to a field that has seen 19 FDA-approved treatments reach patients.
Joan Levy, Chief Science Officer at Melanoma Research Alliance, clarified to Charity Journal that this progress reflects the work of the entire melanoma community, including researchers, clinicians, industry, patients, and caregivers, with immune and targeted drugs first approved in melanoma now gaining approval across many other cancer types.
“Since 2007, we are now building on game-changing research looking at things from circadian immunodynamics to spatial and AI-powered insights, identifying new therapies as well as understanding drug resistance,” said Marc Hurlbert, CEO of MRA.
Closing the gap for rare and resistant melanomas
Levy told Charity Journal that rare melanoma subtypes, including acral, mucosal, uveal, and pediatric melanoma, are frequently diagnosed at more advanced stages and respond poorly to the immune and targeted therapies that work in the more common cutaneous melanoma.
The newly formed RARE Melanoma Research Consortium brings together five leading academic centers with the tools, specimens, preclinical models, and technologies needed to study drug resistance and identify therapies that may prove more effective in these underserved subtypes.
This year’s grants reflect that focus directly. At the University of Utah, Dekker Deacon is investigating the mechanisms driving acral melanoma progression and metastasis, while Boris Bastian at UCSF leads a team science project examining the chromosomal drivers unique to acral melanoma.
Two separate team science awards target uveal melanoma, one at MD Anderson Cancer Center pursuing T-cell receptor therapy and another at Thomas Jefferson University targeting metabolic vulnerabilities in therapy-resistant disease.
The grant portfolio also confronts drug resistance across multiple angles. At UCLA, Zhentao Yang is developing rotational therapy strategies to prevent resistance in MAPK-driven melanomas. Meanwhile, Benjamin Izar at Columbia University is using AI to predict chromosomal instability patterns linked to relapse, and Marcus Bosenberg at Yale is investigating the phenotypic heterogeneity that allows tumors to evade immune therapies.
The Melanoma Biorepository adds critical infrastructure to this work, collecting biological samples that researchers across institutions can access to accelerate studies that would otherwise require years of independent specimen collection. The RARE Registry, a direct-to-patient registry now holding data from 670 enrolled patients across three melanoma subtypes, gives researchers a growing clinical dataset to work alongside laboratory findings.
“Nearly half of patients with advanced melanoma do not respond to current treatments, so we are laser-focused on finding new options through our exceptional grant program and other internal research initiatives,” said Levy.
Melanoma Research Alliance is training the next generation
MRA’s Young Investigator Awards pair early-career researchers with senior melanoma scientists, funding bold ideas while building the mentorship structures that sustain the field over time. This year’s cohort spans institutions including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the German Cancer Research Center, with projects ranging from circadian immunodynamics to prebiotic therapies and stem-like T cell engineering.
The international reach of the 2026 grants, covering researchers in Belgium, Canada, Israel, Germany, and the United Kingdom alongside US institutions, reflects MRA’s positioning as a global convener rather than a domestic funder. At the Free University of Brussels, Panagiotis Karras is mapping cellular niches in melanoma metastasis, while Natalia Freund is investigating decoy antibodies to block a protein implicated in tumor survival at Tel Aviv University.