Melanoma therapy advance

UNIVERSITY of Otagoled research could help discern who will be responsive to melanoma drugs.

The research was published yesterday in the journal iScience.

It was cowritten by senior research fellow Dr Aniruddha Chatterjee and Prof Mike Eccles, both of the Otago department of pathology, and Prof Peter Hersey, of the University of Sydney.

Immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab were first approved by the New Zealand government in 2016 to treat metastatic melanoma.

Dr Chatterjee said these therapies did not work on 60% to 70% of patients.

This was partly because of a protein on the surface of cancer cells, called PDL1, which could block immunotherapy.

The researchers showed epigenetic modification, which changes the frequency with which a cell uses specific genes, influenced whether PDL1 was expressed on the cancer cell surface.

This could be used to show which patients would be receptive to the new line of drugs, Dr Chatterjee said.

‘‘Currently, everyone gets given this drug. At the moment there’s no way to predict who will and won’t respond,’’ he said.

Melanoma was a ‘‘global problem’’ but particularly relevant in New Zealand, which had the highest rates of the disease, he said.

The Health Research Council this month awarded $1.2 million to the researchers to continue their work on New Zealand patients over the next three years.

Dr Chatterjee was last year awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to study the epigenetics of metastasis.

Department of pathology research fellow Dr Euan Rodger and PhD student Antonio Ahn also executed a significant amount of the research work.