PATIENTS WITH ADVANCED MELANOMA that has progressed despite previous treatments now have a new option: Amtagvi (lifileucel), a tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the accelerated approval of Amtagvi on Feb. 16. “It’s important to have as many potential treatment options as possible and TIL therapy adds to the armamentarium of tools we have as oncologists to try to help people with advanced melanoma live longer,” says Rodabe N. Amaria, an oncologist who specializes in advanced stage melanoma at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Cent ..read more

OVER THE PAST FOUR YEARS, treating advanced melanoma with the groundbreaking immunotherapy medication Keytruda (pembrolizumab) after surgery has become the standard of care. “It’s exciting that Keytruda is now available in the field of melanoma treatment,” says Patrick D. Ott, a medical oncologist and the clinical director of the Melanoma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Keytruda uses your own immune system to detect and fight cancer cells. In a treatment protocol known as adjuvant therapy, after all operable signs of cancer are surgically removed, medication is given to preve ..read more

SKIN CANCER IS THE MOST COMMON CANCER IN THE U.S., but it is largely survivable when caught early. The five-year relative survival rate for melanoma is 99% when it’s detected before it spreads to other parts of the body, and almost all cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer can be cured. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not provide any recommendations for skin cancer screening for most people, but experts say checking yourself regularly is key to catching skin cancer early when treatments are most effective. “I recommend that people check their skin every month for new spots ..read more

IMMUNE CHECKPOINT INHIBITORS are an effective treatment for many people with advanced melanoma. However, some people do not respond to these drugs. In two clinical trials, scientists transplanted fecal matter from people with advanced melanoma who responded well to checkpoint inhibitors into people whose cancers had progressed despite the treatments. In both studies, published in the Feb. 5, 2021, Science, some people who received the transplants went on to respond to immunotherapy, despite not having responded before. Although evidence points to the gut microbiota’s role in the immune re ..read more

SEVERAL TIMES OVER THE COURSE of his decades-long career, George Cohen, a dermatologist at USF Health in Tampa, Florida, was asked to help solve a mystery. An oncologist called him up, unable to find the primary tumor in a cancer patient and asked Cohen for an evaluation. Cohen had an idea of where to look. He’s well-aware that Black Americans such as himself are at increased risk for a particularly problematic kind of cancer called acral lentiginous melanoma (ALM), a deadly disease that occurs in one in five Black patients with melanoma, compared with just one in 100 of those who are white. T ..read more

LIKE MANY AMERICANS, Adam Degi didn’t often think about skin cancer. In 2019, at age 35, the Michigan-based comedian was in good health and good humor and had never been a “fun-in-the-sun” type. But he did notice a mole on his back that had been there since childhood was changing size and shape, losing its symmetry. “Because it was on my back, it was out of sight and out of mind,” Degi says. “And because I had it since I was a child, I thought it was no big deal.” Degi was wrong. At the behest of his wife, Degi went to a dermatologist. He was diagnosed with stage III melanoma–a deadly form of ..read more

NEW TREATMENTS such as immune checkpoint inhibitors and targeted therapies have delivered durable and long-term responses in patients with metastatic melanoma. But almost half of people with metastatic melanoma will die from the disease within five years. A type of adoptive T-cell therapy, called tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy, may provide another option for people whose melanoma has advanced after multiple rounds of treatment. This experimental treatment involves harvesting T cells from a patient’s tumor tissue. The extracted T cells, called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), are e ..read more

A NEW PERSONALIZED mRNA vaccine helped prevent recurrence among advanced melanoma patients, according to study results presented April 16 at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2023 in Orlando, Florida. (The AACR publishes Cancer Today.) “Vaccine therapies have really been disappointing in the past, but this really provides the first evidence of vaccine therapy working using this neoantigen approach,” said Timothy Yap, AACR Annual Meeting Clinical Trials Committee co-chair and a medical oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, w ..read more

MANY PATIENTS who have successful surgery to remove melanoma may also receive a type of immunotherapy, called an immune checkpoint inhibitor, that can lower the risk of cancer coming back after treatment. Immunotherapy uses the body’s own immune system to attack and kill cancer cells. This therapy has led to lasting remissions in some patients. Immunotherapy comes with risks, however, including high-grade adverse effects, such as heart inflammation or myocarditis, that can be fatal. A study published Sept. 15, 2022, in Clinical Cancer Research suggests a blood test that measures certain antibo ..read more

RESEARCHERS HAVE DEVELOPED a promising array of new tools to treat advanced melanoma, but they continue to sort out which treatment combinations produce the best responses, especially when melanoma spreads to other parts of the body and tests positive for the BRAF mutation. A study published in the May 1, 2022, issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology found no benefit to adding the experimental immunotherapy drug spartalizumab, a PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor, to two targeted therapies, Tafinlar (dabrafenib) and Mekinist (trametinib). Known as BRAF and MEK inhibitors, these two targeted drugs are ..read more