Dr. Kluger on Immunotherapy in Melanoma

Video

Harriet Kluger, MD, associate professor of medicine (medical oncology), associate director, Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program, Yale Cancer Center, discusses the future for immune therapies in melanoma.

Harriet Kluger, MD, associate professor of medicine (medical oncology), associate director, Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program, Yale Cancer Center, discusses the effectiveness of immunotherapy as treatments for patients with melanoma.

A few years ago, the only two immune therapies that were approved for melanoma were interleukin-2 and interferon, Kluger says. Interferon has never been proven to prolong survival and interleukin-2 only prolongs survival in a small subset of patients.

About two years ago, Kluger says, ipilimumab was approved and is active in a majority of patients. Currently, there is a trial looking at the efficacy of adding a PD-1 inhibitor to ipilimumab. Kluger thinks that these two immune therapies may even be able to be used sequentially.

Kluger predicts that in the future, the first-, second-, and third-line therapy for patients with metastatic melanoma will be an immune-targeted therapy.

Related Videos
Shivaani Kummar, MBBS, FACP, Margaret and Lester DeArmond Endowed Chair of Cancer Research, Professor and Division Head, Division of Hematology/Medical Oncology, Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine; co-director, Center for Experimental Therapeutics, co-deputy director, Knight Cancer Institute
Andre Goy, MD
Wenxin (Vincent) Xu, MD,
Guenther Koehne, MD, PhD
Alessandro Villa, DDS, PhD, MPH
Joseph Mikhael, MD
Michael Richardson, MD
Minesh Mehta, MD
Ruben Olivares, MD
Phillip J. Koo, MD