Boland Discusses Melanoma Treatment Updates

Genevieve Boland, MD, PhD, vice chair of Research in the Department of Surgery, director of the Therapeutic Intralesional Program, surgical director of the Termeer Center for Targeted Therapies, and section head of Melanoma/Sarcoma Surgery, discusses the latest updates to the melanoma treatment landscape.

Recently, adjuvant therapy has been introduced for patients with high-risk stage II melanoma. For patients with stage VI melanoma, the combination of LAG3 inhibition and PD-1 inhibition is now an FDA approved option, says Boland.

Transcript:

I would say some exciting new changes are that we're now FDA approved for adjuvant immunotherapy in patients with high-risk stage II melanoma. So those are patients with no evidence of nodal disease or distant metastatic disease but who have high risk of recurrence. That's very new. But I think it's something that's probably going to change our practice. That stems from studies in stage III patients, those who have nodal or regional disease in the use of adjuvant therapy after definitive curative surgery in those patients and we can use immunotherapy or molecularly targeted therapy. And then I think in the setting of stage four disease, we continue to have more options and one of the exciting studies that was published recently was the addition of LAG3 plus PD-1 as another FDA approved regimen. So, I think it showcases that we have more and more options for our patients in each stage of their disease and the knowledge is benefiting