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Paolo A. Ascierto: The history of melanoma is changing!

Photo taken from Paolo A. Ascierto/LinkedIn

Oct 31, 2023, 09:39

Paolo A. Ascierto: The history of melanoma is changing!

Paolo A. Ascierto, Director Department of Melanoma/Skin Cancers, Cancer Immunotherapy and Development Therapeutics at IRCCS, recently posted on LinkedIn.

“Few days ago at the ESMO23 conference we reported the data from CheckMate 328, the study that evaluated adjuvant therapy for melanoma in stages 2B, 2C and resected stages comparing two groups for a period of one year. The first group was randomized to receive nivolumab, while the second group, as an active control arm, was treated with ipilimumab.

The data we have reported are the result of a 7 and a half year follow up, the longest among phase three adjuvant clinical trials. Well, the results confirm the superiority of nivolumab in terms of recurrence-free survival (RFS) and distant metastasis-free survival (DMFS). The strength is 0.74 for RFS, i.e. the risk of recurrence shows a reduction of 26%, and 0.76 for DMFS, i.e. the risk of the appearance of distant metastases is reduced by 24%.

There is also another piece of data in favor of nivolumab, progression-free survival 2 (PFS2): nivolumab shows that it protects the patient more effectively from the time of the first progression to the second progression.

Although the overall survival and melanoma-specific survival data are comparable between the two study groups, the better results of nivolumab in terms of RFS, DMFS and PFS2 obtained with a follow-up of 7.5 years support its use in these patients, of which 70% are alive at the end of the period under analysis. The history of melanoma is changing!”

Read more here.
Source: Paolo A. Ascierto/LinkedIn