Using drugs to treat melanoma
Medical therapies use drugs to attack your cancer and different types of drugs work in different ways. Medical therapies may be given before and/or after surgery, and might include one or more of the following approaches used in combination with other cancer drugs or treatments:
Immunotherapy for melanoma
A first of its kind new type of immunotherapy — called TIL therapy — offers new hope for patients with metastatic melanoma.
Immunotherapy is an approach that aims to boost your immune system’s ability to find and destroy cancer cells and/or prevent cancer cells from growing. Several types of immunotherapy are used in the treatment of melanoma. These may include:
- Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as pembrolizumab (Ketruda), nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy).
- Oncolytic viral therapy that uses a virus to trigger the immune system against the cancer. T-VEC is a treatment that uses a weakened form of the herpes virus made in a laboratory injected into the tumor. The body mounts an immune response against it, attacking the cancer cells.
- Tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy. This type of cell therapy uses your body's own T cells (special white blood cells) that have already infiltrated your tumor. Roswell Park is an authorized treatment center for Amtagvi, the only FDA-approved TIL therapy for a solid tumor cancer.
Targeted therapy for melanoma
Targeted therapies are drugs that target specific characteristics or unique features found only on the cancer cells. The targeted therapies for melanoma are drugs that target mutations or changes in the BRAF or MEK genes. If your melanoma cells show changes in one or both of these genes, your treatment plan may include one or more of these targeted drug combinations:
- Dabrafenib and trametinib
- Vemurafenib and cobimetinib
- Encorafenib and binimetinib
Chemotherapy for melanoma
Chemotherapy drugs kill fast-growing cells in the body, such as cancer cells. As targeted therapy and immunotherapy approaches are proving more successful against melanoma, chemotherapy is used less commonly. However, a regional chemotherapy approach may be beneficial for some patients with melanoma in a limb, such as an arm or leg.
Regional chemotherapy confines the chemotherapy to a specific region of the body, allowing your physician to use higher doses of the drugs, while sparing the rest of your body from side effects. Roswell Park is the only care center in Western New York that offers regional chemotherapy treatments, such as:
- Isolated Limb Infusion. This treatment delivers chemotherapy only to the affected limb. After surgery to remove as much of the cancer as possible, high doses of chemotherapy drugs are placed directly in the blood vessels leading to the limb. Blood flow to the limb is temporarily halted, keeping the treatment at the tumor site and preventing the drugs from circulating to rest of the body.