The American Cancer Society reports 100,000 people will be diagnosed with skin cancer and more than 8,000 will die from it.

Now, a revolutionary therapy is giving patients new hope.

Steve Balzer spent day after day, year after year, outside working as an electric company lineman.

"Next thing I know this lump's popping up, it's maybe as big as your thumb," Balzer said.

Then he was diagnosed with stage four melanoma. For patients like Balzer, surgery is his first option.

"Skin cancer has never responded to the older chemo therapies. In the last ten years, we've seen dramatic advances with immunotherapies, but unfortunately patients do progress after a period of time," Baylor Scott and White Medical Center Oncologist Ronan Kelly said.

Now, Kelly is one of the first to use a new FDA approved TIL cellular therapy for patients with metastatic melanoma.

"It is a second-generation immunotherapy. It's utilizing their own immune cells, which have proven themselves to be stronger than their other immune cells," Kelly said.

TIL cells are immune cells that look for and attack cancer cells. This new therapy helps make a patient's TIL cells stronger, so they can beat cancer.

"What we do is, we take them from the tumor, we grow them in the laboratory, and we give them back as an infusion of their own strong immune cells to overcome the tumor," Kelly said.

Kelly believes it may soon be the first treatment to treat other solid tumors that haven't responded to traditional treatments like surgery, radiation and chemo.

To cut your risk of getting melanoma, be sure to use sunscreen when you head outdoors and reapply it frequently. The CDC recommends an SPF of 15 or higher.

Try to stay out of the sun from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. when UV rays tend to be strongest.

If you have moles that have abnormal shapes or colors, that can put you at risk for melanoma.