New data confirms a breakthrough melanoma treatment is having life-saving impacts with long-term control achieved for over 50 percent of patients at advanced stages of the condition.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00New data confirms that a breakthrough melanoma treatment is having life-saving impacts with
00:08long-term control achieved for over 50% of patients at advanced stages of the condition.
00:15Melanoma is one of Australia's most common and deadly cancers.
00:18Professor Georgina Long is the Medical Director of the Melanoma Institute Australia and she
00:23joins us now.
00:24Very good to see you, Georgina.
00:25So can you tell us more about the survival rates this new treatment has achieved?
00:30Sure, thank you for having me to speak about this Australian trial.
00:35This was a trial that was conducted only in Australia and what we showed, these are the
00:41updated results now at seven years, that when patients had two immunotherapies together
00:48versus one where they had melanoma that had spread to the brain and normally those patients
00:55would survive 16 weeks.
00:57They are now cured in over 50% of patients.
01:01It's phenomenal but when we first published the initial results in 2018, the first patient
01:09recruited to this trial was in 2014, it changed clinical practice overnight across the world.
01:17So to have these confirmatory long-term overall survival results, it really confirms that
01:24cure rate, dare we say it, don't like to use that word in oncology, but that's certainly
01:30what we're seeing.
01:31So I'm very proud of this Australian trial that was conducted at Melanoma Institute Australia
01:36designed here and opened in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia and it really does talk
01:44to the importance of research and clinical trials to make these drugs available for all
01:49Australians with melanoma, advanced melanoma that had spread to the brain and indeed those
01:54drugs are available.
01:55That's incredible to go from advanced melanoma where it's spread, as you say, to the brain
02:00where patients are terminal to then being cured.
02:04What sort of timeframe are we looking at?
02:06How long does it take this treatment to get from those really severe conditions to being,
02:12as you say, cured?
02:14So it's variable, everybody is different.
02:17It is an immune treatment so the way it works is to stimulate the immune system in a very
02:22specific way to kill the cancer cells.
02:25For some patients we will see results clinically, meaning they're feeling better within six
02:30weeks, and for others it might take a little longer, generally by about three months we
02:36start to truly see it on scans and by six months it's very clear.
02:43But if you're in the group of patients that respond very early and very quickly, we know
02:48very early on that they're cured and we can say that within the first three months of
02:52them meeting me, for example.
02:55So it really does show the power of Australian research and Australian trials.
03:01We've still got more work to do.
03:03There are patients who are still dying every week in my clinics from advanced melanoma
03:09and so we're working very hard in that group of patients to find treatments for them.
03:14Do we know why some patients respond so well to this particular treatment?
03:19We do know a little bit about that.
03:21We've been doing research now for many years, over a decade, on what drives response and
03:27it seems that the tumours where the immune system has recognised it but just can't kill
03:33the cancer, we have more of a chance of curing it with immunotherapy and there are some signs
03:40we can see in the actual melanoma itself that tell us that the immune system has recognised
03:47it but not been able to mount a kill against the cancer cells.
03:53Those patients tend to do better with immunotherapy and funnily enough, it's also those melanomas
03:58that have that chronic sun damage around the melanoma that have all these abnormalities
04:04that make it easier for the immune system to kill.
04:07But having said that, prevention is better than having to go through drug treatments,
04:13the stress, the risk of side effects, the coming back to clinic every three to four
04:19weeks for many years, lots of scans.
04:22Let's prevent melanoma altogether.
04:24It is Australia's cancer.
04:25We have the highest incidence in the world, as you mentioned before.
04:29Someone's diagnosed every 30 minutes with melanoma and if someone dies every six hours
04:35in Australia, most of the melanoma is caused from the sun.
04:40So prevention is the way to go, sun safety.
04:44So let's not get the disease in the first place.
04:46So put on your hat, sunglasses, wear good clothes that cover your skin, seek shade and
04:52lastly, any areas of skin that are exposed, use sunscreen.
04:56That is the best way to protect yourself from melanoma.
05:00Georgina, is this treatment then and these results transferable to other types of cancers?
05:06But that's a good point.
05:07Yes. In fact, it was in melanoma first where immunotherapies showed that they could work.
05:13In fact, for more than 50 years, we've been working in melanoma long before I was in the
05:19field trying to leverage the immune system.
05:23But it's only been in the last decade or so that we've really been able to do that.
05:26What's done in melanoma first then gets translated to other cancers and indeed, we've seen that
05:33the treatments we use in melanoma are now used in lung cancer, kidney cancer, head and
05:40neck cancer, bladder cancer, many, many other cancers.
05:43But the work was first done in melanoma.