Many Stage 3 Melanoma Patients Won’t Benefit from High-dose Interferon Therapy

Source: Melanoma News Today, February 2016

Final results of the Sunbelt Melanoma Trial indicate that most patients with stage III melanoma do not benefit from high-dose interferon treatment, largely because improved diagnostic techniques are now capable of detecting small amounts of lymph node activity in many melanomas — amounts too small to be considered high risk.

The article, “Final Results of the Sunbelt Melanoma Trial: A Multi-Institutional Prospective Randomized Phase III Study Evaluating the Role of Adjuvant High-Dose Interferon Alfa-2b and Completion Lymph Node Dissection for Patients Staged by Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy,” was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The Sunbelt Melanoma Trial was a prospective randomized trial in more than 3,600 people evaluating high-dose interferon alfa-2b therapy (HDI) or completion lymph node dissection (CLND) in patients with melanoma staged by sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy. The first patient who took part in trial was enrolled in 1997.