(ChemotherapyAdvisor) – Disease-specific survival (DSS) appears not to be significantly different between patients with stage 4 melanoma who are administered ipilimumab before surgical resection and those who receive ipilimumab therapy after surgery, according to a small retrospective single-institution study presented at the 66th Annual Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) Cancer Symposium in National Harbor, MD.
“Although our study has a small cohort, the data suggest that surgical resection and ipilimumab treatment may result in long-term survival in a select group of metastatic melanoma patients,” noted Junko J. Ozao–Choy, MD, of the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, CA, and coauthors.
“This is the first study, to our knowledge, to evaluate 5-year DSS in metastatic melanoma patients who have undergone surgical resection as well as ipilimumab treatment,” they noted.
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Ipilimumab has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for treating metastatic melanoma. The coauthors’ search of an institutional patient database identified 44 patients who had undergone surgical resection and ipilimumab therapy for stage 4 melanoma, 19 of whom underwent resection first and 25 of whom were administered ipilimumab first, the coauthors reported.
Among patients who underwent surgery before ipilimumab treatment, 5-year DSS was 65% and median survival time was 60 months, compared with 43% and 47 months, respectively, among patients treated with ipilimumab before surgery, the coauthors reported.
Those differences were not statistically significant (P=0.27), however.
“The role of ipilimumab in combination with surgical resection in metastatic and advanced melanoma needs to be investigated further,” the coauthors argued.
The abstract (#45) for this presentation is available at the 66th Annual SSO Cancer Symposium’s website.
