Addressing Challenges With BRAF Inhibitors in Melanoma

Source: OncLive, May 2019

Transcript:

Hussein A. Tawbi, MD: BRAF inhibitors, specific BRAF inhibitors—in that case specific to the BRAF V600E mutations—transformed the care of patients with melanoma because we managed to induce really high response rates really quickly in those patients. But we also learned, as soon as we started doing that, that it does come at the expense of toxicity. And so patients with experience with a single-agent BRAF inhibitor would experience significant skin rashes, skin photosensitivity, which means that when they kind of go out in the sun, they would be easily burned. They also experienced some almost echinacea-formed rashes that were quite significant.

So there were a bunch of those, including also developing new cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas. Which was really shocking in that we were kind of creating another form of cancer—a lot more benign, a lot easier to manage, but it was still kind of another form of cancer that happened because of that treatment. So that was 1 thing we learned very quickly.