A new melanoma treatment has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The treatment will now include the addition of cobimetinib to vemurafenib to treat melanoma that has spread to other parts of the body and cannot be removed surgically and also has a mutated BRAF gene.
Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the US. Melanoma accounts for 1 in 50 cases of skin cancer and causes the most deaths.
“As we continue to advance our knowledge of tumor biology, we have learned that cancer cells have a remarkable ability to adapt and become resistant to targeted therapies. Combining two or more treatments addressing different cancer-causing targets may help to address this challenge,” said Richard Pazdur, M.D., director of the Office of Hematology and Oncology Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
A trial based out of the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) and 135 other sites in the US, Europe, Australia and Russia showed that the new drug combination slows the growth of melanoma. The study included nearly 500 patients with the BRAF-mutated melanoma.
The results showed:
-a delay in time for symptoms to get worse
-patients treated with the drug combination lived longer
-70 percent of patients’ tumors shrunk partially or completely
For more information about ongoing melanoma research, click here.
