Pre-Surgery Immunotherapy May Increase Survival in Advanced Melanoma
Source: News Center, March 2023
Patients with high-risk, advanced-stage melanoma who received the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab both before surgery (neoadjuvant) and after surgery (adjuvant) had longer event-free survival than patients who received immunotherapy only after surgery according to a recent clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“This showed us for the first time in a randomized trial design that timing of surgery really does matter,” said Sunandana Chandra, MD, MS, associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and a co-author of the study.
In the current phase two clinical trial, patients with high-risk stage III or stage IV melanoma were randomly assigned to either receive neoadjuvant pembrolizumab for nine weeks, followed by surgery, and then followed by adjuvant pembrolizumab for a total of one year; or to undergo surgery followed by adjuvant pembrolizumab only for one year or until their disease recurred or they experienced adverse events.