New cell-based therapy for melanoma more effective than existing treatment, trial finds
A new therapy for metastatic melanoma was shown to be more effective than a leading immunotherapy for the skin cancer.
European researchers announced Saturday that a new treatment for advanced melanoma was more effective than the leading existing therapy in a Phase 3 clinical trial.
The treatment, which uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight the cancer, has some similarities to another type of treatment that has proven to be highly effective for blood cancers, called CAR-T therapy.
CAR-T therapy involves harvesting a patient’s T cells and modifying them in the lab to turn them into cancer fighters, then infusing the cells back into the patient. The personalized treatment was first shown to be successful a decade ago in certain leukemia patients; it’s now also used for lymphomas as well as multiple myeloma.
And while it’s been explored for solid tumors, which make up the majority of cancers, including melanoma, these tumors present challenges that blood cancers do not. Many blood cancers are homogeneous, meaning their cells are uniform. This gives CAR-T therapy a clear target to latch onto and attack. But solid tumors tend to have a number of different cell types that vary largely between cancer types, said Dr. Vincent Lam, an assistant professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who specializes in immunotherapies.
First child to receive CAR T-cell therapy is 10 years cancer-freeMay 11, 202206:17This heterogeneity of the tumor cells makes finding a convenient and universal CAR-T target difficult in solid tumors, said Lam, who was not involved with the new research.
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