Complete response in patients with advanced melanoma treated with ICIs

Immunotherapy, a novel form of cancer treatment that boosts a person’s own immune system to fight cancer cells, has revolutionized care for patients with melanoma and has helped them live significantly longer. People who respond well to immunotherapy tend to have long lasting responses; however, there are people who still end up having their disease come back. In addition, there are also side effects associated with immunotherapy that can be permanent and life-threatening. There are single drug immunotherapies and there are combination immunotherapies given for melanoma, each with a different risk profile for chances of side effects and a different likelihood of response.

Our goal is to characterize the patients here at our cancer center who have received immunotherapy as their first treatment for advanced stage melanoma. Our hypothesis is that patients who respond very well to immunotherapy will have long lasting responses regardless of the amount of immunotherapy they get after they have a good response. We aim to capture information regarding the type of immunotherapy they have gotten, how long they have been receiving the therapy for, any side effects they may have developed from the treatment, and whether their disease came back, either after discontinuing treatment or while they were on treatment. We will compare patients who have had their disease come back after treatment to those patients who did not to see if there are any differences in characteristics of their melanoma. We are also interested in exploring whether these patient’s original tumors contain any information about their immune cells that may help guide likelihood of having side effects to immunotherapy. This information will help us better understand how long we should be continuing these treatments for and balancing the risks of developing serious side effects in order to improve care for patients with melanoma.