Jeffrey Weber, MD, PhD, Describes Unmet Needs for Patients with Melanoma

Jeffrey Weber, MD, PhD, of NYU Langone Health spoke with CancerNetwork regarding the unmet needs for patients with melanoma and the binary treatment options for this group of patients.

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So, the challenge in our business is which treatment to give them after surgery, what adjuvant treatment? It comes down to a particular binary choice, we either give them PD-1 antibodies like nivolumab (Opdivo) or pembrolizumab (Keytruda) or you give them BRAF/MEK drugs and dabrafenib/trametinib are the 2 approved for that indication. So, the unmet need is what do you do after surgery for a high-risk patient? The other unmet need is what do you do in metastatic disease? And there, it comes down to what’s your front-line treatment, and generally that’s immunotherapy. Then the question is, if you’re BRAF-mutated, what do you do if you fail immunotherapy? If you fail (ipilimumab [Yervoy] plus nivolumab), you don’t have a lot of options. So, that’s where BRAF/MEK drugs will come in handy and have been very useful.