NOT FOR EVERYONE
ing,” says melanoma researcher Lynn Schuchter, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “The pace is unbelievable.” No one can claim to have cured melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer.
It’s diagnosed in 77,000 Americans a year and kills more than 9,400 a year.
But after decades of failure, the spate of new drugs is helping more patients than ever, giving people like Herry more time and better quality of life, Schuchter says.
Doctors now dare to hope that giving these new drugs in sequence, or in combination, will help patients live for years while feeling relatively well.
Unlike traditional chemo, which indiscriminately kills growing cells, the new generation of melanoma drugs works in a precise way, based on a better understanding of the specific genes and proteins that drive cancer growth, says Timothy Turnham, executive director of the Melanoma Research Foundation.
“The reason we’re seeing these breakthroughs is because we did the basic science research to help us understand how this cancer happens, how it escapes therapy and how it progresses,” Turnham says.
Many of the new drugs aim to remove melanoma’s “cloak- None of the new melanoma drugs works for everyone. And none is riskfree. » Ipilumumab can cause severe side effects, created when the immune system attacks the body itself, says Lynn Schuchter, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Vemurafenib, approved in 2011, can cause non-lethal skin cancers. ing device,” allowing it to be recognized and killed by the immune system, says Roy Herbst, chief of medical oncology at the Yale Cancer Center.
Other drugs — such as the two approved Wednesday, trametinib and dabrafenib — target growth signals within cancer cells.
Herry has tried two of the newer drugs from Bristol-Myers Squibb: ipilumumab, ap- proved in 2011, and an experimental drug called nivolumab.
Although her tumors increased while taking ipilumumab, Herry says a CT scan earlier this year found they had shrunk by half after beginning nivolumab.
The most noticeable side effects from nivolumab have been moderate fatigue and vitiligo, a loss of pigment on some areas of her hands and arms,