But a leading medical oncologist,Associate Professor Alex Menzies from Melanoma Institute Australia,believes immunotherapy treatments - using the body's immune system to attack the cancer cells - mean 50 per cent of these patients are surviving long enough to be considered cured.
Despite decades of warnings about the danger of sun exposure,more than 1700 Australians are estimated to have died from melanoma last year.
Remarkably,Associate Professor Menzies believes the latest developments in immunotherapy could halve that number this year.
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“Immunotherapy is the biggest breakthrough in medicine in our generation,” he said. “Across the whole body of medicine,I think it’s been the biggest breakthrough potentially since penicillin."
The statistics for melanoma are still confronting.
According to the institute,one Australian is diagnosed every 30 minutes - the highest rate along with New Zealand in the world.