What’s in a name?  If it’s ipilimumab – or “ipi” for short – it may be the first name associated with prolonged life expectancy for melanoma victims.  This new immune stimulator has been making headlines recently for its early success in increasing stage four melanoma survival rates for up to four months. While that might not sounds like a lot, it’s considered highly significant. Dr. Steven O’Day of the Angeles Clinic and Research Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., a lead investigator in the recent melanoma trial explains,

This important because this is a disease where the average survival in these patients is six to nine months, so to increase on average the survival by an additional four months is a very large difference.

And though as Dr. Charles M. Balch, a melanoma expert at Johns Hopkins, said the results of the recent clinical trials are “a single, not a home run,” he added that for this disease, which impacts almost 70,000 Americans a year and growing, “even a single was important”.  As further described in The New York Times coverage of ipi,

In a study of patients who had advanced melanoma, those who got an experimental drug lived a median of about 10 months, compared with 6.4 months for those in a control group. After two years, about 23 percent of those who got the drug were alive, compared with 14 percent in the control group.

Lung cancer and melanoma are among the hardest cancers to treat. So the studies are being viewed as significant advances, though far from cures.

Dr. O’Day, who presented the research at this month’s ASCO conference, said no prior large randomized trial in melanoma has been able to demonstrate an improved survival in this type of cancer at all. 

He calls ipilimumab “the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.”

“These results are exciting because patients with melanoma have few treatment options,” Dr. O’Day said. “After 30 years of failed studies, we finally have an option that shows a significant increase in overall survival, an endpoint that many oncology studies strive for. This new class of inhibitors that overcome T-cell suppression offers hope to melanoma patients and oncologists alike.”

The NY Times article provides a good explanation of how T-cell suppression works to possibly slow tumor growth rate though without yet being able to “put the brakes on”:

Ipilimumab is a more general immune booster. It blocks a protein called CTLA-4 that acts as a brake on T cells, the soldiers of the immune system. It is already also being tested against lung and prostate cancer.

Still, if a tumor does not elicit a strong immune response to begin with, then just keeping the response going longer would not help much, just as lifting one’s foot from the brake usually will not make a car go faster if the accelerator is not pressed.

We at MoleSafe are heartened by this news.  As always, we encourage regular and thorough screenings to provide the best line of first defense in preventing melanoma from reaching crisis status.  Please contact us at any of our now 6 clinical screening locations.