SMR Congress

Victoria Atkinson, MD, medical oncologist, Princess Alexandra Hospital, University of Queensland, discusses the Columbus trial for patients with melanoma.

Jeffrey S. Weber, MD, PhD, deputy director and co-director of the Melanoma Program at the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Medical Center, discusses the use of nivolumab (Opdivo) in the adjuvant setting for the treatment of patients with melanoma.

Treatment with genetically engineered tumor infiltrating lymphocytes showed some signs of activity and very little added toxicity for patients with metastatic melanoma.

While chemotherapy has historically been used to treat patients with Merkel cell carcinoma, immunotherapy advances have infused new hope into the treatment landscape.

Jason Luke, MD, assistant professor of medicine, University of Chicago Medicine, discusses the combination approach of a PD-1 antibody plus an IDO inhibitor for patients with melanoma.

Alan Shain, PhD, postdoctoral scholar, UCSF School of Medicine, discusses the role of genetics in melanoma.

Adil Daud, MD, clinical professor, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses challenges facing the treatment landscape of melanoma.

The use of intralesional therapies in combination with checkpoint inhibitors has shown to be an improvement to monotherapy and combinations with immunotherapy in melanoma.

Georgina V. Long, BSc, PhD, MBBS, chair of Melanoma Medical Oncology and Translational Research at the Melanoma Institute of Australia (MIA) and Royal North Shore Hospital, University of Australia, discusses the patients with melanoma who respond best to the combination of dabrafenib plus trametinib.

Rodabe N. Amaria, MD, assistant professor Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology, Division of Cancer Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses the results of a recent trial testing neoadjuvant and adjuvant dabrafenib plus trametinib versus standard of care in high-risk resectable BRAF-mutant melanoma.

Results from a safety, tolerability, and dose escalation phase Ib/II study involving intratumoral SD-101 and pembrolizumab (Keytruda) have demonstrated that the combination was well-tolerated with no dose-limiting toxicities.

Treatment with the combination of dabrafenib and trametinib before and after surgery demonstrated a dramatic improvement in relapse-free survival compared with the standard of care for patients with stage IIIb/c or oligometastatic BRAF-mutant melanoma.

Keith T. Flaherty, MD, director of the Termeer Center for Targeted Therapy, Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, discusses the results from the COLUMBUS trial, testing encorafenib plus binimetinib compared to vemurafenib or encorafenib as single agents.

Bin Zheng, PhD, assistant professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School and assistant biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses the potential for phenformin, a drug created for Type 2 diabetes, to be used for patients with melanoma.

The combination of the BRAF inhibitor encorafenib and the MEK inhibitor binimetinib reduced the risk of progression or death by 46% compared with vemurafenib (Zelboraf) for patients with BRAF-mutant unresectable melanoma.

The combination of nilotinib and trametinib proved to be synergistic in BRAF/NRAS wild-type melanoma.

The combination of dabrafenib and trametinib continued to demonstrate durable efficacy for patients with BRAF V600E/K-mutant melanoma across patient subgroups in a 3-year analysis of the phase III COMBI-d study, with baseline site of metastasis identified as a predictor of overall survival ≥36 months,

Graham Mann, MBBS, PhD, FRACP, professor of Medicine, Westmead Clinical School and co-director of the Centre for Cancer Research, The Westmead Institute for Medical Research at the University of Sydney in Australia, discusses his findings from the Australian Melanoma Genome Project, which were presented at the 2016 Society for Melanoma Research (SMR) Congress.

Stefani Spranger, PhD, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, discusses recent findings about why a certain subgroup of patients with melanoma do not have T cells within their tumor microenvironment.

Helmut Schiader, MD, discusses why drug resistance may be due to epigenetic changes and not mutation-induced changes, as well as the role of immunotherapy/targeted therapy combinations in combating resistance.

The combination of atezolizumab and cobimetinib may lead to a higher overall response and a longer progression-free survival than either agent alone in patients with metastatic melanoma.

Christian Blank, MD, PhD, Netherlands Cancer Institute, discusses some of the early findings from the OpACIN trial testing a combination of ipilimumab and nivolumab in the neoadjuvant and adjuvant setting for patients with stage III melanoma.

Neoadjuvant therapy with the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab is plausible and effective but can induce a high level of adverse events calling for further research into better tolerated dosing schemes.

Ryan Sullivan, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses how best to treat patients with melanoma who have the BRAF mutation.

The addition of the PD-L1 inhibitor atezolizumab to the MEK inhibitor cobimetinib and the BRAF inhibitor vemurafenib induced a high response rate for patients with BRAF-mutant unresectable melanoma.

Dirk Schadendorf, MD, Head of Department for Dermatology, Venerology und Allergology, University Hospital Essen, Germany, discusses the results from the phase III CheckMate 067 study, which looked at a combination immunotherapy regimen in advanced melanoma.

Treatment with the combination of vemurafenib and cobimetinib improved overall survival by 4.9 months compared with vemurafenib alone for patients with BRAF mutation-positive advanced melanoma.

A treatment regimen of pembrolizumab plus low-dose ipilimumab was tolerable and effective for patients with advanced melanoma.

In the largest-to-date analysis of treatment-naïve metastatic melanoma patients with BRAF V600 mutations treated with dabrafenib and trametinib, researchers have found that baseline LDH levels and number of disease sites were the most significant factors affecting survival.

Two separate early phase clinical trials exploring pembrolizumab-containing immunotherapy combinations have shown objective response rates over 50% in patients with advanced melanoma.