Searching for Biomarkers to Better Guide Melanoma Therapy

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hello. I'm Dr Jeffrey Weber. I'm a medical oncologist at the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City.

I apologize for not having the usual bow tie. As many of you know, we're in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and we've been asked not to wear ties when we're seeing patients.

I would like to talk to you about a recent article in Lancet Oncology by Dummer and colleagues, which is a very interesting biomarker study from the COMBI-AD trial. This was a well-performed trial of adjuvant therapy with dabrafenib (BRAF inhibitor) plus trametinib (MEK inhibitor) in patients with resected stage IIIA, IIIB, and IIIC melanoma by the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) 7th edition criteria. This trial began in 2015 and now has approximately 44 months of follow-up in the dabrafenib/trametinib arm and 42 months in the placebo arm. This was a nice phase 3 study where the clinical results for the primary endpoint of relapse-free survival have already been described.

We all would like to see biomarkers for the use of our targeted therapies and immunotherapies. This is one of the first publications that describes a relatively rigorous assessment of biomarkers where, of the 870 patients randomized on this trial (roughly 430 per arm), about 250 per arm had NanoString RNA data where an interferon gamma expression signature was assessed, and about 180 patients per arm had genetic sequencing done.