Expert: KEYNOTE-716 Could be a “Game-Changer" for Patients with Stage 2 Melanoma At High Risk of Recurrence
Source: Pharmacy Times, June 2023
Until this study, adjuvant immunotherapy was standard of care for stage 3B melanoma but not stage 2, which has relatively similar survival rates and risk of recurrence.
Jason J. Luke, MD, FACP, Associate Professor of Medicine at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, discusses standard use of adjuvant immunotherapy for earlier stage melanoma to reduce risk of recurrence and distant metastasis with Pharmacy Times at the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, from June 2 to 6.
Jason J. Luke, MD, FACP: Well, in melanoma, we had an explosion of treatment options in the past 10 years. But unfortunately, despite that great success, many patients unfortunately do still relapse after surgery and have inadequate options in that setting. So really, in thinking about where the field needs to go, there’s sort of a 2-pronged attack. One would be moving therapies that we know are more effective into the perioperative setting with the hopes that that would reduce the number of patients who ever actually develop relapse; as well as obviously developing new treatments for patients with truly refractory metastatic disease.