Oncologists Experience Improved Survival in Patients With Melanoma
Evan Lipson, MD, discusses feedback he’s received from colleagues about responses in patients with melanoma.
Evan Lipson, MD, an associate professor of oncology at John Hopkins School of Medicine and a head and neck oncologist at John Hopkins Medicine, discusses feedback he’s received from colleagues at Case-Based Roundtable events about patients with melanoma.
After meeting with oncologists participating in the roundtable discussion, Lipson says that much of the conversation revolved around the response durability of immunotherapy. Many of his colleagues expressed their enthusiasm about the advancements made over the past 10 to 15 years in melanoma. He said the statistics for survival support this sentiment; the 5-year survival rate is now 94.1%, according to the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program.
According to Lipson, patients with melanoma had poor survival outcomes, but with newer agents this has improved significantly. Some of these immunotherapy agents include atezolizumab (Tecentriq), pembrolizumab (Keytruda), nivolumab (Opdivo) plus relatlimab-rmbw (Opdualag), ipilimumab (Yervoy) plus nivolumab, nivolumab alone, and lifileucel (Amtagvi) in different subgroups of melanoma all approved in the past 5 years. Many of these therapies are used for unresectable or metastatic melanoma. Lipson shares these participants’ positive outlook for patients who are experiencing better survival due to the developments in this setting.
TRANSCRIPTION:
0:10 | I think a lot of the discussions centered around the durability of some of the responses, particularly to immunotherapies. I find that a lot of the doctors [who] participate have been impressed with the strides that have been made in the melanoma space in the last, say, 10 years or so. It used to be that patients with melanoma had a pretty lousy life expectancy, and now with some of the newer agents, it does seem that we're certainly not—we're not getting there for absolutely every patient, but the statistics for the large majority of them are a whole lot better than they were, say, 10 or 15 years ago. So it's just really gratifying to hear that the patients that are being treated by my colleagues are having these favorable outcomes in many cases.
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