Standard Adjuvant Therapy for Melanoma Within Reach

Source: OncLive, December 2017
Adjuvant treatment for patients with high-risk melanoma has seen little progress until recently. This is in large part due to the lack of consensus in the community on what treatments to use, when to use them, and in which patients to implement them, explains Michael B. Atkins, MD.
Traditional treatment options such as interferon, pegylated interferon, and high-dose ipilimumab (Yervoy) have caused debate in the melanoma community. According to Atkins, none of these options show enough benefit to justify their widespread use.
Results of the COMBI-d study showed the promise of the combination of dabrafenib (Tafinlar) plus trametinib (Mekinist) in patients with BRAF-mutant melanoma. As for the all-comers population, the use of single-agent nivolumab (Opdivo) in the adjuvant setting demonstrated superior benefit to ipilimumab in a recent study presented at the 2017 ESMO Congress.