Party With a Purpose 2025 Marks Progress Against Melanoma

When caught early enough, treating melanoma can be one of the few cinches in cancer: An excision, a bandage, and a patient could be on their way home. But late-stage melanoma presents an entirely different picture, with 34.6% five-year relative survival for stage 4 disease.

With melanoma incidence on the rise—especially among young adults—the Friends of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Foundation are gathering for the annual Party with a Purpose to support further research even as they celebrate the progress that melanoma researchers have already made.

Every year, the Party with a Purpose honors individuals whose experiences with cancer, be they scientific or humanitarian, have allowed them to advocate for new research and treatments. The 2025 honorees are:

• Scientific Achievement Honoree: Lynn M. Schuchter, MD, director of the Tara Miller Melanoma Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center.
• Early Career Investigator Honoree: Alexander Huang, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Schuchter, a senior colleague of Huang, nominated him for the honor.
• Humanitarian Honoree: Patricia D. Wellenbach, immediate past president and CEO of the Please Touch Museum and immediate past board chair of Thomas Jefferson University/Jefferson Health. Wellenbach is herself a cancer survivor.

New to the Party with a Purpose this year is the Community Impact Award, which will be presented to the Tara Miller Melanoma Foundation.

Founded in 2014 by attorney Tara Miller after she received a melanoma diagnosis, the foundation has since partnered with Schuchter to fund innovative melanoma research. Miller passed away that same year at 29 years old, but the foundation that bears her name continues its work in raising money for further melanoma research.

Scientific Honorees: The State of Melanoma Research and the Potential for Future Treatments

This year’s scientific honorees will receive grants for their melanoma research from the funds raised by the Party with a Purpose. We spoke with Schuchter and Huang about the state of the field and their vision for future projects.

How did you come to research melanoma, and what has your experience in the field been?

Schuchter: I’ve been a medical oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 30 years, and melanoma first grabbed my attention when I was a fellow. Back then, there were already hints that the immune system and immunotherapy would be relevant in improving treatments for patients with melanoma. That seemed quite interesting to me, and ever since, I’ve been working on the interplay between the immune system, immunotherapy, and melanoma.

In that time, I’ve come to work closely with a broad multidisciplinary team—surgeons, radiation oncologists, dermatologists, pathologists—because, as such a stubborn disease, melanoma requires a wide array of expertise and perspectives if a patient is to be properly cared for and treated. After more than 30 years, the remarkable progress we’ve made for many patients with melanoma continues to propel me forward, as well as for all those patients whose disease resists existing treatments.

Huang: When I was in medical school, back in 2009, there was nothing we could do for patients with stage 4 melanoma, most of whom died within six to nine months. But I’d just then joined a lab that was making therapeutic dendritic cell vaccines, which was an exciting new immunotherapy for melanoma at the time. Seeing the hope that those dendritic cell vaccine clinical trials gave patients inspired me to pursue a career in cancer immunology, especially melanoma.

When I came to Penn, I started working under Lynn, who was the leader of the melanoma program, and her leadership is a big part of why I’ve continued down this path. This is such an exceptional group that it was very easy for me to settle in, get the mentorship I needed, and grow my lab, where we’re focusing on melanoma as a prototype for T-cell immunotherapy. Our research has broadened to immunotherapy across different cancers based on the lessons that melanoma has taught us.

How has research improved treatments for melanoma over the past few decades, and what challenges remain?

Schuchter: When we look at the trend curves for patients with stage 4 melanoma, their survival is improving thanks to advances in both immunotherapy and targeted therapy, which were amazing new tools to treat patients with melanoma. And around the same time we were learning about immunotherapy, BRAF, a very important driver mutation in cancer, was described, which led to the development of pills—targeted therapy—that patients could take to treat melanoma. Those pills could block the pro-cancer activity of the mutated BRAF gene, and we’d often see some fairly dramatic responses from that treatment. So for patients with advanced melanoma, we’ve definitely observed survival prolongation.

However, in general terms, melanoma is still a growing epidemic, primarily in two groups of patients: younger women, in whom incidence has been rising, but also older men. A lot of this is due to cumulative exposure to the sun and UV damage, but in general, I think it’s important to recognize that incidence across the board continues to increase, for which there are probably many reasons.

I’d really like to emphasize the importance of early detection in melanoma. A simple skin exam can catch melanoma at a stage where five-year survival is upward of 97%. There are other cancers for which, yes, we have screenings and scans, but those aren’t necessarily practical or simple, or there are diseases like pancreatic cancer where early detection is next to impossible right now. Whereas, when it comes to melanoma, knowing what a suspicious skin lesion looks like, or the importance of skin exams in general, can make all the difference in early diagnosis and effective treatment.

Dr. Schuchter, why did you nominate Dr. Huang for this honor? And, Dr. Huang, what project do you plan to pursue with this funding?

Schuchter: Alex came to us with just an unbelievable knowledge of immunotherapy, both in terms of how the immune system functions on a mechanistic level and how to manipulate the immune system to treat cancer. His dedication and commitment have allowed him to understand and improve T cells for use in melanoma treatment and beyond.

Early on, we recognized his intellect, his drive, and his selflessness. In a very short period, Alex developed a platform for us that can study immunotherapy’s impacts on patients with cancer almost in real time. His robust system for data collection and immune analysis from clinical cases has allowed us to identify very early signaling pathways; understand some of the mechanics behind why some patients respond to immunotherapy and why others don’t; and how we should most effectively design and use treatment strategies.

Everybody wants to work with Alex—the research nurses, the data managers, the biospecimen collectors—because he recognizes the importance of the entire team and treats these samples from patients as the precious resources they are. His platform’s ability to identify the speed of the signals between cancer and immunotherapy treatments has very exciting implications not just for melanoma but for breast cancer, for lung cancer, for a whole slew of indications.

He never misses an opportunity to thank and appreciate the clinical staff who help make his research possible, and his humanity comes through in everything he does. I’d say Alex is a very special awardee this year, and we are so proud of the work that he does every day. This investment in his research is going to be beneficial for so many patients and so many other researchers, because he truly models what it means to be a scientist in today’s modern, exciting cancer research world.

Huang: That’s very kind of Lynn to say all that, but it’s also true that I’ve learned everything from her and watching her lead this team, which has been quite the inspiration—and that inspiration is why I’m so excited to continue to develop our platform with this funding.

When you go to different institutions, everybody is talking about immune monitoring, but very few can do it the way that we can because of what we’ve invested in measuring the immune system’s response to immunotherapy with speed and precision. Our people are our strength—nurses, technicians, and researchers willing to sometimes stay up all night in order to get the data, and over a period of years, to boot.

We were measuring 18 different molecules when we started in 2014, and that was considered very high-tech. Now we’re measuring tens of thousands of molecules. Half my lab spends their time running analyses on an enormous trove of data, and those findings help us inform clinical decision-making. Recently, we developed an algorithm that could identify how combination immunotherapy causes T cells to attack the tumor in waves as they evolve within the body in response to the treatment, which gives us valuable information for timing and dosages so they can be maximally effective.

I think that, when it comes to treating some cancers, but especially melanoma, we’ve hit a bit of a plateau in progress. The standard immunotherapies we have now, like anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors, were huge breakthroughs. But in my opinion, as we’ve layered on more and newer immunotherapy innovations like anti-LAG3 interventions, the relative benefit is getting smaller and smaller. And I think we need to rethink and develop another novel approach to break past that plateau.

Take TIL therapy: that was only just approved last year, and now my whole team is excitedly collecting data from melanoma patients receiving TIL therapy for the first time. Thanks to the platform we’ve already built, we can ask important, granular questions about this new treatment: Which TILs are most effective against melanoma that resisted immune checkpoint inhibitors? What happens when we expand the most effective TILs and re-infuse them? And so on.

We’ll continue to expand our melanoma data pipeline with this funding and grow our lab, too, by hiring and mentoring young researchers. As much as data are the future, so are the next generation of scientists who will apply their insight and creativity to that data. We all start somewhere, and I’m pleased to have the opportunity to invest in future cancer researchers.

A Humanitarian Perspective: Patricia “Trish” Wellenbach on Surviving Cancer while Chairing Jefferson Health

The life of Jefferson Health’s board chair—a figure responsible for Philadelphia’s largest health care provider and employer of more than 65,000—is a busy one. But during her tenure as chair, Wellenbach saw her life become exceedingly complicated when she received a cancer diagnosis. Wellenbach decided to remain in her position despite her ongoing treatment, and she spoke with us about what she learned from that unique experience.

You stayed on as board chair while receiving cancer treatment. How did you manage that experience?

Wellenbach: While I was running the board, having a cancer diagnosis in the back of my head, it was difficult to know what the road ahead looked like. “Whom do I tell? When do I tell them?”

I wouldn’t wish a cancer diagnosis on anyone, and when I got mine, coming to terms with it was a real struggle. At the same time, though—having come out the other side of this—I’m glad it happened to me when it did. I do think my experience allowed me to contribute more to Jefferson. Usually, when you’re in a leadership role in an organization, you’re not in the rooms where people’s lives are being changed dramatically, every day. But I was.

I’m grateful that I could bring that perspective to the highest level of how a large health care enterprise made its decisions. I couldn’t have said any of that when I was first diagnosed, but I’m so glad that I can now. At the time, I wasn’t new to cancer, per se. I’d worked for years in oncology supportive care service, I had been a founding organizing board member of The Wellness Community, and I was on their board for seven years before running the organization as executive director for seven years. All throughout, I talked a lot about the patient experience with cancer—the sense of isolation and loss of control. I’d said those words for years, but all of a sudden, I had to live those words for myself.

I think my experience with cancer made me a better leader of Jefferson’s board. I remained committed to my work throughout my treatment because it seemed like the natural way to cope with the stress. Occasionally, that meant radiation or chemo at 7 in the morning before I’d have a day of meetings, but I think my experience as a patient gave me a unique opportunity.

I could speak to my fellow board members with firsthand experience of how Jefferson was operating at the ground level. By what felt like fateful coincidence, I even had my surgery scheduled on the day of a board meeting. I don’t know whether everyone saw my orange patient wristband, but I do know that we had meaningful discussions about how to better meet patients where they already are.

As a survivor, what are your hopes for cancer research?

I think, much the same as most people, I want to see progress. And I believe that progress will continue so long as we continue to invest in and nurture the passion of emerging scientists to build on all the work that’s been happening.

Ever since the ’70s, when we really began to double down on cancer research, the infrastructure we’ve built—the research protocols, the clinical trials, the care centers—has paid stunning dividends.

The diagnostic test and treatments that I received were made possible with research, and I’m still here. But many others aren’t. I lost a friend this summer, who’d only been diagnosed four months before—and even then, until it was confirmed, she thought she was just under the weather, with maybe the flu or COVID. Sadly, those shocking stories still happen. I believe that further research will lead to more breakthroughs for patients who don’t currently have any options, which is why we need to keep pushing forward.

Join the Friends of the AACR Foundation for the 22nd Annual Party with a Purpose gala on Sunday, October 26, 2025. Tickets and tables are available at various sponsorship levels.