《肿瘤瞭望》：作为2014年北京国际黑色素瘤的联合主席，您对中国黑色素瘤临床和基础科研工作者有何寄语？

　　Prof. Flaherty: I think our Chinese colleagues consider themselves to be relative newcomers to the international melanoma research community having historically not having a focus on melanoma. It being a relative rare tumor type to the Chinese population compared to the other common cancers that affect both Chinese and Western populations， while that is true we westerners come to the this conference and come to building our relationship with Chinese investigators with the hope that they can give us a deeper and more rapid insight in the biology of acral-lentiginous melanoma which are the types of melanomas that affect Chinese patients. On a per one hundred thousand patient basis those types of melanoma are no more common in Chinese patients than in Caucasian populations in the west but in the west those patients are diluted by the much more common entity of cutaneous sun related melanoma and much of our focus in the future is on that more common entity at the expense of really focusing and understanding how these two sub-populations behave clinically， how they respond or don’t respond to the same types of therapies molecular targeted and immunotherapy that are being developed for melanoma as entire disease entity. Therefore understanding the unique biology of these sub-groups we think is very much the purview of the Chinese and Asian melanoma research community. We’ve been fortunate in the melanoma field across the United States， Europe and Australia to have quite a cohesive research community; not a lot divisions or differences in philosophy about research and therapeutic development as well and we very much look to Chinese and Asian colleagues to join that community and maintain what arguably global harmony in terms of how it is that we try to tackle this still challenging problem. We welcome this congress and its second iteration as an opportunity to really strengthen this tie and hope that we more and more lean on each other for our strengths and ability to focus on the relevant sub-populations of this disease such as I have described.