UCLA investigators and colleagues have found that pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug that helps the immune system attack cancer cells, can effectively shrink or eliminate tumors in patients with unresectable advanced desmoplastic melanoma, a rare and often aggressive form of skin cancer that cannot be fully treated with surgery.
The study, published in Nature Medicine, showed that in nearly 90% of patients who participated in a multicenter clinical trial, melanoma tumors were eliminated or significantly reduced after they received the drug, highlighting the therapy as a promising treatment option for this difficult-to-treat cancer.
Responses to the therapy were often rapid, the researchers said, with some patients seeing tumor reduction within two months. Many maintained their remission long after stopping the treatment. After three years, 84% of patients were still alive, and 72% showed no signs of cancer progression.
Pembrolizumab is an anti-PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor, which is designed to boost the ability of cancer-fighting immune cells in the body called T cells to recognize and attack cancer cells.
“The promising results from this trial show that pembrolizumab can offer durable benefit for patients with a melanoma subtype that previously had no successful treatment options, and now we know that desmoplastic melanoma is among the cancers with the highest response rates to the anti-PD-1 class of cancer immunotherapies,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Antoni Ribas, a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and director of the tumor immunology program at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The study was funded in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute.
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