Pre-Surgical Immunotherapy Identifies Potential Benefit, Risk of Recurrence in Melanoma

Source: Cure Today, May 2018

For patients with melanoma, administration of a PD-1 checkpoint blockade therapy in the neoadjuvant setting – meaning it was given before the main treatment – could result in improved outcomes, according to study results presented at the 2018 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting.
In addition, the researchers, from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, found that in giving patients Keytruda (pembrolizumab) before surgery, it also provided information about which patients will benefit and which may be facing an increased recurrence risk.
“Our data suggest that giving patients this therapy before surgery may give us a sense of whether or not therapy will be effective against surgery,” Alexander C. Huang, M.D., instructor of Hematology-Oncology in the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said in a press release.