Saturday, March 26, 2022

FDA approves new immunotherapy treatment for advanced melanoma

Photo credit – Oregon Health Sciences University
Fritz Liedtke
CANCER DIGEST – March 25, 2022 – There’s new hope for patients with an aggressive form of skin cancer that can’t be treated with surgery. 

The FDA approved a new treatment regimen that combines two immunotherapy drugs that significantly extends progression-free survival.

The FDA approval follows the results of the RELATIVITY-047 clinical trial that involved 714 patients with advance, previously untreated melanoma. 

Patients were randomly assigned to receive the combination therapy of relatlimab and nivolumab or nivolumab alone. Results of the trial were published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Jan. 6, 2022.

At one year after starting the trial, 48 percent of those in the combination therapy survived with the cancer not processing, called progression-free survival. That compared to 37 percent of the nivolumab group surviving that long without cancer progression. 


The median progression-free survival for the combination group was 10.2 months compared to 4.6 months for the single drug group.

“The FDA’s approval of this novel combination therapy is an exciting development for all of us in the melanoma community,” says Dr. Lipson, an associate professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and co-author of the study.

The combination therapy delivers a kind of one-two punch to cancer cells by blocking a pair of proteins one on the cancer cell surface that are needed for the cancer to spread and the other on T cells that attack cancer cells.

Nivolumab blocks the protein called PD-1 on cancer cells and has been approved by the FDA previously for melanoma and other cancers. Relatlimab blocks the signaling protein LAG-3 on T cells, which revs up the anti-cancer response to cancer cells.

The RELATIVITY-047 trial was sponsored by Bristol-Myers Squibb. Dr. Lipson is a paid consultant and advisory board member.

Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine press release

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