Ipilimumab Plus Surgery Boosted Advanced Melanoma Survival

Patients with stage IV melanoma treated with a combination of ipilimumab and surgical resection had a high rate of melanoma-specific and overall survival, a retrospective study of a single-center case series has shown.
“To our knowledge, this is the first report of 5-year melanoma-specific survival data on patients who have undergone surgical resection and ipilimumab treatment, and the data suggests that surgical resection and ipilimumab treatment may result in long-term survival in select metastatic melanoma patients,” Dr. Junko Ozao-Choy said at the annual Society of Surgical Oncology Cancer Symposium.
Among 44 patients treated with the CTLA-4 (cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen 4) inhibitor ipilimumab (Yervoy) and surgical resection, the 5-year melanoma-specific survival (MSS) rate was 51% and the median overall survival duration was 60 months, reported Dr. Ozao-Choy of the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif.
For 24 patients who received ipilimumab before resection, the 5-year MSS was 61% at a median of 60 months, and for 18 of 20 patients treated with ipilimumab after surgery, the 5-year MSS was 42% at a median of 47 months, but this difference was not significant (data were incomplete for 2 patients in the latter group), she noted.
In a recent study of retrospective data on patients with metastatic melanoma treated at her center, the 4-year survival of patients who underwent resection of metastatic lesions with or without systemic medical therapy was 20.8%, compared with 7% for those who underwent systemic medical therapy alone. The study investigators concluded that more than

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