Making melanoma therapy personal: an interview with Dr Keiran Smalley for Melanoma Management

Dr Smalley earned his PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2001. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Oncology Department of University College London, the Institute of Cancer Research, Fulham Road and the Wistar Institute, PA, USA. Currently, Dr Smalley is a Professor in the Departments of Tumor Biology and Cutaneous Oncology at the Moffitt Cancer Center, FL, USA. He is also currently the Donald A Adam Endowed Chair in Melanoma Research and is the Director of the Melanoma and Skin Cancers Center of Excellence. The lab of Dr Smalley focuses upon the development of targeted therapy strategies for melanoma and is currently funded by the NCI, the pharmaceutical industry and a number of philanthropic sources. Dr Smalley's work is highly translational in nature and work from his lab has led to the initiation of a number of clinical trials. To date, Dr Smalley has published over 120 papers in top peer-reviewed journals including Cancer Research, Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, New England Journal of Medicine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Lancet, Gastroenterology and Clinical Cancer Research. He currently sits on the editorial boards of Clinical Cancer Research, Biochemical Pharmacology, Drugs, Melanoma Research and the American Journal of Clinical Dermatology and is the Associate Editor of Pharmacological Research. Dr Smalley is a charter member of the Basic Mechanisms of Cancer Therapeutics Study Section for the NCI/NIH and has served on many other peer review panels for the Department of Defense, the state of Texas and numerous melanoma research foundations. He has also fulfilled advisory roles with the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh and a number of pharmaceutical companies. Dr Smalley has been a visiting professor at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2011 and in 2014 received a Science Without Borders Scholarship from the Brazilian Government.