Recent advances in melanoma treatment – American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2012 perspective

The 2012 ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) annual meeting has been held once again at the McCormick Conference Center in Chicago, Illinois, where ASCO has booked a 10-year run for the meeting. The meeting was attended by more than 30,000 oncology professionals from around the world. Of more than 4500 abstracts published at the meeting, 310 were related to melanoma. Here we report the results of the most interesting clinical trials presented at the meeting. Apart from updated overall survival (OS) results of a phase 3 study evaluating the efficacy of vemurafenib and some new data on ipilimumab (expanded access program [EAP] and treatment of patients with brain metastases) we report on practice changing trials: a phase 3 (BREAK) trial evaluating efficacy of dabrafenib and a phase 3 study (METRIC) assessing trametinib in the treatment of metastatic melanoma patients. Another encouraging treatment strategy is combination of da­brafenib and trametinib evaluated in a phase I/II study. Results of new im­mune checkpoint targeting by monoclonal antibody anti-PD1 (BMS-936558) in an early phase trial in monotherapy or in combination with a multipeptide vaccine in metastatic melanoma patients are presented. Also, results of dendritic cell-based vaccine (randomized phase II trial) immunization in patients with high risk resected melanoma are shown. Furthermore, results of other melanoma immunotherapy strategies evaluated in early phase studies are reported.