Can Adding Bevacizumab Improve Outcomes in Mucosal Melanoma?
Source: Cancer Network, July 2019
CHICAGO—A combination regimen of bevacizumab, a blood vessel growth inhibitor, with carboplatin plus paclitaxel appears to be active and safe as first-line treatment in patients with advanced mucosal melanoma, according to the results of a phase II trial (abstract 9521) presented at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, held May 31–June 4 in Chicago.
“There is not standard treatment for mucosal melanoma, and though we give chemo for first-line treatment, the response rate is less than 10%,” said corresponding author of the study, Jun Guo, MD, of the Key Laboratory of Carcinogenesis and Translational Research (Ministry of Education) in the Department of Renal Cancer and Melanoma at Peking University Cancer Hospital & Institute in Beijing.
While mucosal melanoma is not common in Caucasian populations, it is the second most common subtype of melanoma in Asians. Since these tumors tend to be highly vascularized, the investigators reasoned that adding bevacizumab may make chemotherapy more effective in this patient population.