Unmet Needs Persist for Patients with Melanoma

Melanoma was the topic of some of the most exciting abstracts at this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting. Among these was the practice-changing NADINA trial (NCT04949113) investigating neoadjuvant ipilimumab plus nivolumab vs adjuvant nivolumab in macroscopic stage III melanoma.

However, even with these developments, unmet needs still persist for patients with advanced melanoma. These include the need for more effective treatments, improved management for adverse effects, psychosocial support, information and education, and access to care.

Here Maya Dimitrova, MD, medical oncologist at the Perlmutter Cancer Institute at NYU Langone Heatlh, discusses some of the unmet needs in melanoma and how abstracts presented at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting address these.

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0:05 | One thing we’re still actively researching and something that we need that we need for our patients is for patients with brain metastases. So that is still a very hard to treat population. And especially those who don’t respond to immunotherapy, the treatment options are very limited. So there were several abstracts where we’re looking to improve on the responses that we have already. Other things that are active areas of research, and again, abstracts that were presented, are for patients who failed to respond to immunotherapy, which although it’s our frontline therapy, half of patients will not have a response to checkpoint inhibitors. And so still very much a large area of unmet need for those where we’re looking at combinations with different types of checkpoint inhibitors, but as well as cancer vaccines.