Медицинский совет (Jun 2022)
Symptomatic melanoma metastases in the brain: are we using all therapy options?
Abstract
In recent years, significant advances have been made in systemic therapy for patients with metastatic melanoma of the skin, resulting in an increase in one-year overall survival (OS) from 25 to 85% and 5-year OS from less than 10 to 60% in certain patient subgroups. Approximately 50% of patients with metastatic skin melanoma are diagnosed with metastatic brain lesions in the course of the disease. Modern drug therapy for metastatic brain lesions is slowly but surely proving to be effective. Thus, in the presence of a mutation in the BRAF gene, BRAF inhibitor monotherapy provides an intracranial objective response rate (iORR) of 25 to 40%, whereas BRAFi + MEKi combined targeted therapy (CTT) achieves already 58% iORR, including in patients with symptomatic metastases to the brain. However, the duration of responses achieved on targeted therapy (TT) is shorter than for extracranial disease prevalence. On the other hand, regardless of the presence of a BRAF mutation, immunotherapy (PD-1 monotherapy) achieves a response in approximately 20-22% of patients, but these responses are more durable, although fewer than on TT. The combination of CTLA-4 + PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors produces long-lasting responses with a iORR of 51-54%. However, the achievement of these results and an overall increase in life expectancy with immunotherapy is mostly possible in symptom-free patients and in patients receiving low or no doses of glucocorticosteroids (10 mg or less on prednisolone). Therefore, for symptomatic patients, especially those whose tumors have been identified with a BRAF mutation, a combination of targeted therapy, which would quickly achieve an objective response in 58%, and anti-PD1/PDL1 immunotherapy, which is likely to increase the duration of the response achieved and give a chance for a sustained remission, looks promising. This article provides an overview of key studies and our own experience with the triple combination in metastatic brain lesions.
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