'Very Impressive' Overall Survival for Melanoma Combination

Hello. This is Dr Jeffrey Weber. I am a medical oncologist and deputy director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at New York University Langone Health in New York City.

Today I will be continuing to report on some very interesting melanoma abstracts presented at the 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting.

This time we are going to talk about targeted therapy. I am reporting on an abstract delivered by Dr Reinhard Dummer on the COLUMBUS study^[1] which was a three-arm randomized phase 3 study of two new drugs, encorafenib (BRAF inhibitor) and binimetinib (MEK inhibitor), compared with encorafenib alone or vemurafenib, the then-standard single BRAF inhibitor.

This study was [instigated] by the fact that encorafenib seemed like a very interesting drug with a relatively low off-rate from BRAF. This might give it some advantages because you could either administer it less often or it might have a better physiologic advantage over drugs that equally inhibit BRAF but have a quicker off-rate and might not be quite as effective. This drug was combined with binimetinib, which, interestingly, has a shorter half-life than the standard BRAF inhibitors that we use.

This was a well-designed, fairly large, 1:1:1 randomized study with 577 total patients and about 190 patients per arm.