Expert Discusses Treatment Approaches, Research Needs for Patients With Extracutaneous Melanomas

Source: Targeted Oncology, January 2018

While there has been much focus on adjuvant therapy in the cutaneous melanoma setting, there remains little known about effective adjuvant therapies in extracutaneous melanoma. The recent approval of nivolumab (Opdivo), based on findings of the randomized phase II CheckMate-238 trial, showed favorable results for patients with completely resected melanoma with lymph node involvement of metastatic disease, however, less than 30 of the 900 patients in the trial were cases of extracutaneous melanomas.
“There has to be a robust effort to make sure there is funding for laboratory research to understand the mechanisms as to why it is different, how it behaves, and how we can treat it better. We need clinical trials, in some cases specific to each disease,” said Richard D. Carvajal, MD.
In an interview with Targeted Oncology during the Chemotherapy Foundation Symposium, Carvajal, a medical oncologist at Columbia University Medical Center, where he is Director of Experimental Therapeutics and Director of the Melanoma Service, discussed considerations when diagnosing and treating extracutaneous melanomas and the importance of treating such diseases differently than the more commonly seen melanomas.