New Systemic Therapy Options for Unresectable and Metastatic Cutaneous Melanoma

Dr. Michael Atkins and Dr. Vernon Sondak highlight the latest updates to the systemic therapy for melanoma recommendations in this newest guideline. The discussion covers neoadjuvant and adjuvant therapy for resected cutaneous melanoma, options for unresectable and/or metastatic cutaneous melanoma, and therapies for noncutaneous melanoma. They review the importance of this guideline and the most pressing outstanding questions to help inform better treatment strategies for patients with melanoma. Read the full guideline update, "Systemic Therapy for Melanoma: ASCO Guideline Update" at www.asco.org/melanoma-guidelines.

TRANSCRIPT

This guideline, clinical tools, and resources are available at http://www.asco.org/melanoma-guidelines. Read the full text of the guideline and review authors’ disclosures of potential conflicts of interest disclosures in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO. 23.01136

Brittany Harvey: Hello and welcome to the ASCO Guidelines podcast, one of ASCO's podcasts delivering timely information to keep you up to date on the latest changes, challenges, and advances in oncology. You can find all the shows, including this one at asco.org/podcasts.

My name is Brittany Harvey, and today I'm interviewing Dr. Michael Atkins from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Dr. Vernon Sondak from H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, authors on “Systemic Therapy for Melanoma: ASCO Guideline Update.”

Thank you for being here today, Dr. Atkins and Dr. Sondak.

Dr. Vernon Sondak: Happy to be here.

Dr. Michael Atkins: Yeah, it's a pleasure.

Brittany Harvey: Great. Then before we discuss this guideline, I'd like to note that ASCO takes great care in the development of its guidelines and ensuring that the ASCO conflict of interest policy is followed for each guideline. The disclosures of potential conflicts of interest for the guideline panel, including Dr. Sondak and Dr. Atkins, who have joined us here today, are available online with the publication of the guideline in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, which is linked in the show notes.

So then, to dive into the content here, Dr. Sondak, what prompted this full update to the Systemic Therapy for Melanoma Guideline, which was initially published in 2018?

Dr. Vernon Sondak: Well, the last 10 years or so have seen enormous advances in the management of metastatic melanoma and localized melanoma with systemic therapy, and the last few years haven't slowed up at all. So since 2018, we've seen new approvals, we've seen key pivotal trials that have shown some amazing results that we'll talk about, and all of these things together weighed into the decision to update the systemic therapy guidelines.

Brittany Harvey: Great. Thank you for that background on what prompted the update. So then, this guideline provides updated recommendations across four clinical questions. I'd like to review the key updated recommendations for our listeners. So first, Dr. Sondak, what has changed in the updated recommendations regarding neoadjuvant therapy for adults with resectable cutaneous melanoma?

Dr. Vernon Sondak: Neoadjuvant therapy is one of the most rapidly evolving and exciting parts of the management of melanoma with systemic therapy. The updated guidelines now include neoadjuvant pembrolizumab as a new recommendation for patients with resectable stage IIIB to IV cutaneous melanoma. This is based on the SWOG S1801 clinical trial, which was a very simple and yet incredibly influential clinical trial. It took patients with resectable metastatic melanoma, either metastatic to the lymph nodes or beyond, as long as it could be removed surgically, and randomized all of the patients to either get surgery, followed by a year of adjuvant pembrolizumab, which is very standard, or the same exact surgery and the same total amount of pembrolizumab, but with three of the doses given before surgery. So that simplicity, that ability to just compare the effect of neoadjuvant or preoperative pembrolizumab to entirely postoperative adjuvant pembrolizumab, made this trial a really pure assessment of the value of neoadjuvant pembrolizumab.

 Impressively, this study showed a significant improvement in event-free survival for patients who got those three doses of pembrolizumab upfront. What's event-free survival? That includes relapse-free survival, but also the kinds of events that you can see happening with neoadjuvant therapy, such as progression of the disease prior to surgery that makes the patient unresectable. And the bottom line is that there was really the same number of issues with neoadjuvant pembrolizumab as with surgery, followed by adjuvant therapy, but there were many fewer recurrences among the patients who got neoadjuvant pembrolizumab. So that's why this was put into the guidelines.

Brittany Harvey: Excellent. I appreciate you reviewing the evidence behind those recommendations and what's new for neoadjuvant therapy.

So then, Dr. Atkins, moving into adjuvant therapy, for patients with resected cutaneous melanoma, what is new in the recommendations regarding adjuvant systemic therapy options?

Dr. Michael Atkins: Sure. In the prior version, adjuvant therapy was recommended for patients with stage IIIB, IIIC, and for some patients with stage IV resected to NED. And those were based on studies with adjuvant pembrolizumab, adjuvant ipilimumab, and adjuvant nivolumab compared to ipilimumab. But what's happened since then is some really important adjuvant studies have been carried out in patients with stage IIB, IIC, and IIIA disease who are at slightly lower risk of recurrence, but still have substantial risk of recurrence, and make up a large percentage of the patients who eventually develop stage IV disease.

And in these studies, one with pembrolizumab compared to placebo, there was about a 40% to 50% reduction in relapse-free survival observed, leading to the FDA approval of pembrolizumab in that setting. And then recently we saw the results of a similar study involving nivolumab that showed maybe even a slightly better reduction in the risk of relapse in that same patient population. Ultimately, this will lead to FDA approval as well. And we felt it was important to put in the guidelines the results of these studies so that people can have informed discussions with their patients about whether they want to receive this therapy going forward. It's important to point out that we don't have good data yet on overall survival. We just have data on relapse-free survival. So we don't, for sure, know that treating patients early, rather than waiting until a subset of them relapse and treating those late leads to an improved overall survival. That's an important discussion to have with patients to provide them with this option.

In addition, we saw the results of the IMMUNED trial, which looked at nivo-ipi or nivo monotherapy versus placebo or observation in patients with stage IV disease that had been completely resected. And we saw dramatic improvement for the nivo-ipi combination compared to nivo or observation in those patients with stage IV NED. And we felt that, therefore, this was also an important patient population where we should offer guidance

Brittany Harvey: Absolutely. That shared patient-clinician decision-making is paramount. And then you've both reviewed the options for resected cutaneous melanoma. But Dr. Atkins, what is new regarding systemic therapy options for patients with unresectable and/or metastatic cutaneous melanoma?

Dr. Michael Atkins: Yes. For patients with unresectable metastatic cutaneous melanoma, there was a new drug combination that was approved combining nivolumab with relatlimab, which is an anti-lag-3 antibody that showed benefit compared to nivolumab monotherapy across almost all subgroups. In particular, the benefit was similar regardless of BRAF mutation status, regardless of elevated LDH, and regardless of patient stage. That led to FDA approval, and this is now an available treatment option, which is associated with less toxicity and similar efficacy to the standard of care nivo-ipi.

In addition, although nivolumab-ipilimumab had been approved and was in our last recommendation for patients with BRAF-mutated melanoma, we didn't really know whether they should receive BRAF/MEK inhibitors, which were also approved, versus nivolumab-ipilimumab as their initial therapy. And so in the past few years, we saw the results of the DREAMseq trial, which randomized patients with BRAF-mutant melanoma to either nivolumab-ipilimumab, followed by BRAF-MEK inhibitor progression, versus the converse sequence. And we saw that at two years, the starting with a nivolumab-ipilimumab had a 20% improvement in two-year overall survival. This prompted the NCCN to change their guidelines to list nivolumab-ipilimumab or other immunotherapies as a preferred frontline therapy. And we thought that this data was important enough and somewhat validated by a randomized phase II trial, the SECOMBIT, which had a lot smaller numbers to encourage us to change the guidelines.

Other minor things that we did were to take T-VEC and no longer recommend that as an option for patients with BRAF-wild type disease who had progressed on anti-PD-1 therapy and that ipilimumab and ipilimumab-containing regimens were no longer recommended for patients with BRAF-mutated disease after progression on other immunotherapy. We felt that those patients probably are best served to get BRAF/MEK inhibitors.

Brittany Harvey: It's good to have clarity on some of those sequencing options for patients and also on which treatments are working better for patients in these subpopulations.

So then, Dr. Sondak, the last set of recommendations. What has changed regarding options available for patients with noncutaneous melanoma? 

Dr. Vernon Sondak: There's no question that our patients with noncutaneous melanomas, such as uveal melanoma or mucosal melanoma, have many fewer options and haven't benefited as much from the revolution in treatment that we've seen with our cutaneous melanoma patients, but there have been definite improvements and progress. The full update incorporates new recommendations for uveal melanoma that were published in 2022 as a rapid recommendation update, specifically a new drug called tebentafusp, which is restricted to HLA-A*02:01-positive patients. It's HLA-type restricted, but it is active in patients with metastatic uveal melanoma. And so the new guideline is that previously untreated patients with metastatic uveal melanoma who are HLA-A*02:01-positive should be offered tebentafusp as a treatment option. So that means all our patients with metastatic uveal melanoma should get HLA typed, so they know if they're a person who is eligible for this treatment and it should be considered early on in the treatment paradigm.

Brittany Harvey: Well, thank you both for reviewing the updates to these evidence-based recommendations. There's a lot that's new in this field. 

So then, Dr. Atkins, what is the importance of this guideline? And in your view, how will it impact clinicians, and also how will these guideline recommendations affect patients?

Dr. Michael Atkins: Sure. Well, we have new treatments such as relatlimab and tebentafusp that are available and should be offered to appropriate patients, and new data on how to optimally apply previously approved treatments such as nivolumab-ipilimumab in patients with BRAF-mutated or resected stage IV melanoma, pembrolizumab use in the neoadjuvant setting, and nivo and pembro in earlier stage disease. And with this new information out there and included in the guidelines, hopefully, this will allow practitioners to give the best possible treatments to their patients, and patients to receive treatments which will improve their outcomes.

Brittany Harvey: Absolutely. It's great to have new data to better inform treatment options for patients with melanoma.  

So then, finally, Dr. Sondak, what are some of the most pressing outstanding questions regarding systemic therapy for patients with melanoma that may need to be addressed in a future guideline update?

Dr. Vernon Sondak: Every advance brings up new questions. In neoadjuvant therapy, we have single-agent pembrolizumab with strong data from the randomized trial I spoke about. We anticipate more data about combination immunotherapy, specifically low-dose ipilimumab and nivolumab in the setting of neoadjuvant therapy. There are some trials going on with that. The best neoadjuvant treatment, the best sequence, how long should we treat, and even should we change the surgery based on the results of neoadjuvant therapy, not just the surgery, but the postoperative adjuvant therapy? Those are all questions that are key in the neoadjuvant side. 

In the adjuvant therapy side, we have much more clarity now about BRAF versus immunotherapy in unresectable disease, but we still don't know always what's the best adjuvant therapy for our BRAF-mutated patients. That's an area we hope will eventually get more clarity, but I think it's going to take a while for that.  

And finally, we'll learn more about the optimum sequencing of patients with metastatic disease, but especially for the patients who've already failed adjuvant or neoadjuvant therapy. So much of the data that Dr. Atkins and I talked about in metastatic disease, whether cutaneous or noncutaneous, involved previously untreated patients. But so many of our metastatic disease patients today have come to us already with some form of treatment in the adjuvant or neoadjuvant setting. We still have a lot of work to do to define the best treatment strategies for those patients. 

Brittany Harvey: Definitely. Well, we'll look forward to learning more as new data comes out and as some of that research comes to fruition. So I want to thank you so much for your work to update this guideline and thank you for your time today, Dr. Sondak and Dr. Atkins.

Dr. Vernon Sondak: Thank you.

Dr. Michael Atkins: You're very welcome. Thanks a lot.

Brittany Harvey: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in to the ASCO Guidelines podcast. To read the full guideline, go to www.asco.org/melanoma-guidelines. You can also find many of our guidelines and interactive resources in the free ASCO Guidelines app available in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. If you have enjoyed what you've heard today, please rate and review the podcast and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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