From Caribbean360

LONDON, England, Monday June 16, 2014 – Exposure to year-round sunshine, in a region where watersports and outdoor activities are the norm, places Caribbean people at risk for potentially deadly skin cancer.

Advanced melanoma – skin cancer which has spread to other organs – has proved very hard to treat, and until a few years ago the average survival was around six months.

Now, the results of two international trials against advanced skin cancer have been hailed as “exciting and striking.”

Both treatments for advanced melanoma are designed to enable the immune system to recognise and target tumours using the experimental drugs pembrolizumab and nivolumab to block the biological pathway cancers use to disguise themselves from the immune system.

The findings, released at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago, showed that in a trial of 411 patients evaluating pembrolizumab, 69 percent of patients survived at least a year.

According to a BBC report, the drug, which used to be known as MK-3475, is also being tested against other tumour types which use the same mechanism to block attack from the immune system.

“Pembrolizumab looks like it has potential to be a paradigm shift for cancer therapy,” said Dr David Chao, consultant oncologist at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, who is conducting trials in both melanoma and lung cancer patients.

One of Dr Chao’s patients, 64-year-old Warwick Steele, has been receiving infusions of pembrolizumab every three weeks since October. Before the treatment started he could barely walk because the melanoma had spread to one of his lungs and he found it hard to breathe.

“I got tired simply standing up and was literally too exhausted to shave. But now I feel back to normal and can do gardening and go shopping,” Steele was quoted as saying by the BBC.

Scans of his lungs revealed that after just three infusions, the drug appeared to have completely cleared the cancer from his lung.

The other drug, nivolumab, was tested in combination with an existing licensed immunotherapy, ipilimumab.

In a trial of 53 patients, survival was 85 percent after one year, and 79 percent after two years.

“I am convinced that this is a breakthrough in treating melanoma,” said John Wagstaff, Professor of medical oncology at Swansea College of Medicine, who is part of a larger trial of these two drugs.

“The trial is still ‘blinded’ so we don’t know what treatments the patients are getting, but we have seen some spectacular responses.”

Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, was quoted as saying: “It’s exciting to see the range of new treatments that are emerging for people with advanced melanoma.”

The BBC report nevertheless pointed out that doctors are urging caution: The results which have been published are of Phase I, early stage trials.

Much larger Phase III trials are underway, and only when they report, in about a year’s time, can clinicians be sure what the likely benefits will be. (BBC News)

For more on this story go to: http://www.caribbean360.com/news/potential-breakthrough-in-treatment-of-skin-cancer?utm_source=Caribbean360%20Newsletters&utm_campaign=58429cf7a1-Vol_9_Issue_119_News6_16_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_350247989a-58429cf7a1-39393477