Response to Initial Immunotherapy Treatment Predicts Melanoma Outcomes

Source: Medscape, November 2019

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

I’m Dr Jeffrey Weber, deputy director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health in New York City. I want to briefly describe an article by Huang and colleagues^[1] that was published in March in Nature Medicine. This paper reported an interesting neoadjuvant study in patients with resectable melanoma. I should point out that neoadjuvant studies are all the rage now in melanoma and a number of other histologies that are sensitive to immunotherapy.

In this study, patients with resectable stage IIIB, IIIC, and IV melanoma were given a single dose of the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) antibody pembrolizumab. Three weeks later, the patients had surgery and then received 1 year of adjuvant pembrolizumab, which is now a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved therapy.