What's the News: Three new drugs have been shown to improve survival and slow disease progress in patients with metastatic melanoma. This advanced form of the disease is the deadliest type of skin cancer, with patients surviving for an average of only 6 to 9 months. Phase III clinical trials of the treatments---a new chemotherapy drug, an immune-system treatment combined with traditional chemotherapy, and a vaccine combined with another immune treatment---were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.New Chemotherapy Drug:
The chemotherapy drug, vemurafenib, blocks some of the effects of BRAF gene mutations, which are found in about 60% of melanomas.
In this study, the researchers compared how 675 advanced melanoma patients with mutated version of the BRAF gene fared when taking either vemurafenib or dacarbazine, a chemotherapy drug often used to treat the disease.
Tumors shrank significantly in 48% of patients on vemurafenib, but in only 5% ...
