Stage III Melanoma: Adjuvant Therapy Trials

Source: OncLive, August 2019

Transcript:

Jeffrey S. Weber, MD, PhD: You’ve seen the patient. The testing is in. How do the data from recent trials influence your management in the adjuvant scenario? Jason, tell us a little about the recent article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Dr Axel Hauschild. It was really the long-term follow-up of the COMBI-AD trial. I think they’re out to something like 4 years by now. So this is a very impressive follow-up. What does it tell you?

Jason J. Luke, MD, FACP: When we get a patient in the adjuvant setting for stage III disease, obviously we have options for both immunotherapy and targeted therapy. The targeted therapy options are based on the COMBI-AD study, which was initially presented a couple of years ago and really showed an outstanding benefit for relapse-free survival. And now we’re starting to see further updates for the longer-term follow-up of those patients.

I think they’re quite impressive results. Looking out at 3 years, we see relapse-free survival rates somewhere in the 60% range—55%, 60%—and overall survival is still trending that far. The big question is, what percentage of these patients would truly be cured with targeted therapy? There’s sort of a hypothesis that we’re suppressing things. Are we truly eliminating those cells?