Source: Managed Healthcare Executive, May 2025
A common virus carried by approximately half of adults worldwide may improve outcomes for melanoma patients receiving immunotherapy while also protecting against severe treatment-related side effects and limiting the spread, according to new research from the University of Oxford.
The study, published in Nature Medicine, found that patients with cytomegalovirus (CMV) who received single-agent anti-PD-1 immunotherapy for metastatic melanoma had significantly improved survival compared with CMV-negative patients. Benjamin P. Fairfax, Ph.D., professor of Cancer Immunogenetics at the University of Oxford, led the study.
Benjamin P. Fairfax, Ph.D.
“Our work also has potentially fundamental implications for our understanding of skin cancer development, because it shows that factors that influence the immune system independently of cancer can have unanticipated effects on melanoma development,” said Fairfax in a news release.