New drug fights metastatic melanoma
Compound offers hope for about half of patients with advanced form of the skin cancer
By Nathan Seppa
A new drug may change the landscape of melanoma treatment, offering patients a treatment option that goes beyond anything previously used against the skin cancer, new research shows. Tests in people whose melanoma had spread show the drug was able to shrink tumors in most patients and, in a few cases, even wiped the growths out, scientists report in the Aug. 26 New England Journal of Medicine. The compound targets the protein encoded by a mutated version of the BRAF gene that underlies melanoma in roughly half of all patients.
“This demonstrates for the first time that a targeted therapy can work in melanoma,” says Richard Marais, a molecular biologist at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. “This is an enormous advance in the field. It’s just unparalleled.”
Early-stage melanoma that is confined to a spot on the skin can be surgically removed and in most cases stopped. But patients’ prospects take a deadly turn if the cancer metastasizes, or spreads, to other parts of the skin or to internal organs. Chemotherapy drugs benefit fewer than 20 percent of such patients. Survival outlook varies with the extent of the cancer’s spread and the age of the patient, but it is usually measured in months, not years.