Melanoma patients receive new options

FDA approves 2 new drugs, puts another on fast track with ‘breakthrough’ designation

Becky Herry has tried nearly every drug available for melanoma.

A few years ago that would have been a very short list. Until recently people with advanced melanoma often died within a year of diagnosis, even with chemotherapy.

For the first time, however, patients such as Herry have options.

The Food and Drug Administration approved two new melanoma drugs in 2011 — the first new therapy for the disease in more than a decade — and approved two from GlaxoSmithKline on Wednesday.

All improve survival by a few months.

The FDA also has put a Merck melanoma drug, lambrolizumab, on a fast track to approval by designating it a “breakthrough” therapy.

Several other drug companies are also working on melanoma therapies.

Melanoma research will take center stage at the four-day annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which begins Friday in Chicago. Doctors will present 288 melanoma studies, compared to only 62 a decade ago.

“The number of new melanoma therapies is sort of astonish- says Herry, 57, from Santa Cruz, Calif.

She’s been able to continue working as a registered nurse throughout these latest treatments.

Older melanoma therapies — including interferon, interleukin-2 and five chemo drugs — caused much more serious side effects, leaving her too sick to work, Herry says.

When the new immune therapies work, they can keep cancer at bay a long time, says Schuchter, who has patients whose cancer has been controlled by ipilumumab for three years.

Other studies released in advance of the conference have shown positive results.

» Asmall study of 69 melanoma patients combined ipilumumab and nivolumab.

In a subgroup of 17 patients, 41 percent saw their tumors shrink by 80 percent or more, says study co-author Jedd Wolchok of New York’s MemorialSloan Kettering Cancer Center.

» In a study of 122 patients, a Genentech immunotherapy shrank tumors in 39 percent of patients whose tumors made lots of a particular protein but only 13 percent of patients whose tumors lacked this marker.

While many of these patients had melanoma, the drug — a manmade antibody to block a protein called PD-L1 — also helped control tumors in the lung, kidney, bladder and other organs, Herbst says.