Melanoma & Skin Cancer

The molecular profile of Merkel cell carcinoma differs depending upon whether the malignancy is driven by ultraviolet light or by a virus and can be correlated with responses to immunotherapy, according to recent study findings.

Jeffrey S. Weber, MD, PhD, discusses the updated analysis of the phase III CheckMate-238 trial in patients with resected stage III/IV melanoma.

The treatment landscape changed significantly with the first melanoma clinical trials in 2001, which evaluated the CTLA-4 antibodies ipilimumab (Yervoy) and tremelimumab.

The European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has recommended approval of nivolumab at a flat dosing schedule of either 240 mg over 30 minutes every 2 weeks, or 480 mg infused over 60 minutes every 4 weeks, for the adjuvant treatment of patients with melanoma who have involvement of lymph nodes or metastatic disease who have undergone complete resection.

Keith T. Flaherty, MD, discusses treatment beyond frontline therapy for patients with BRAF-mutant relapsed/refractory melanoma.

Five melanoma experts discuss findings from several exciting studies presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting that are helping to change the way patients with malignant melanoma are treated.

Paul D. Nathan, MBBS, PhD, FRCP, consultant medical oncologist, Mount Vernon Cancer Centre, discusses the long-term outcomes with the combination of dabrafenib (Tafinlar) and trametinib (Mekinist) in patients with BRAF V600-mutant unresectable or metastatic melanoma.

Mario Sznol, MD, professor of medicine, co-director, Yale SPORE in Skin Cancer, Yale Cancer Center, discusses the benefits of immunotherapy, specifically the combination of the CTLA-4 inhibitoripilimumab and the PD-1 inhibitor nivolumab, in melanoma.

David Polsky, MD, PhD, Alfred W. Kopf, MD Professor of Dermatologic Oncology, Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology, professor, Department of Pathology, and director, Pigmented Lesion Service, NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, discusses the next steps that have to be taken to validate the clinical utility of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) as a biomarker in BRAF-mutant melanoma.

A 2018 Giants of Cancer Care® award winner in Melanoma and Other Skin Cancers, Caroline Robert, MD, PhD, has helped clarify the role of immune therapies in advanced melanoma with her groundbreaking work on clinical trials evaluating anti– CTLA-4 and anti–PD-1 antibodies.

Caroline Robert, MD, PhD, head of the Dermatology Unit at the Institut Gustave-Roussey, co-director of the Melanoma Research Unit at INSERM 981 Paris-Sud University, explains why patients with melanoma and brain metastases were excluded from a trial evaluating the efficacy of dabrafenib plus trametinib.

Encorafenib (Braftovi) plus binimetinib (Mektovi) had superior overall survival and progression-free survival compared with encorafenib or vemurafenib (Zelboraf) alone in patients with BRAF V600–mutant melanoma.

Michael E. Hurwitz, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, Yale Cancer, Center, discusses the various patient cohorts in the ongoing phase I/II PIVOT-02 trial.