Latest in Melanoma Treatment: A Team Effort
The American Cancer Society estimates that about 123,000 new cases of melanoma are diagnosed in the US every year, however a group agencies are working to minimise future risk and improve treatments.
Given the lethal nature of the disease, effective forms of treatment are much sought after – and the surge in activity in the field in recent months has been heartening. In the latest anticancer drug trial, experts discovered a new approach that may effectively treat melanomas driven by mutations in the NRAS and KRAS gene.
Last week, in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, Dr. David F. Stern, professor of pathology at Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut, reported that pairing statins with cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors might be successful in combating these highly resistant cancerous tumours. The extent of the danger of melanoma is demonstrated by how adept this cancer strain is able to spread to other parts of the body – and once spread, survival rates fall dramatically.
There have been many contributions towards the treatment of melanoma this year. Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Centre in Tampa, Florida carried out a clinical trial in October involving combination therapy which drew a high response rate from some of its participants – all patients with metastatic melanoma. Those partaking in the trial were given chemotherapy and an immunotherapy of adoptive cell transfer (ACT) with tumour infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL). The following month, at the 6th World Meeting of Interdisciplinary Melanoma/Skin Care Centres & 8th EADO Congress, a San Diego-based company, OncoSec Medical, announced positive results from an on-going trial investigating its own proprietary treatment in metastatic melanoma patients.
Furthermore, NICE has just approved two new treatments for advanced melanoma skin cancer for use in the UK: Vemurafenib (or Zelboraf) is manufactured by Roche and has been recommended for the treatment of melanoma that has spread; and ipilimumab (or Yervoy) by Bristol-Myers Squibb, aims to treat advanced melanoma in people who have previously received chemotherapy.
But Stern and his team have acknowledged that some patients who have a specific cancer-driving genetic mutation never respond to the matching drug – even when successfully identified. Therefore they argue that using drug combinations may be essential in order to mitigate drug resistance and enable effective treatment of cancers driven by signalling molecules that currently cannot be targeted, such as RAS. With RAS proteins active in up to a third of all human cancers, including melanoma and lung and pancreatic cancers, this new development proves optimistic for the cancer R&D space.