Prof Jedd Wolchok - Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA
Prof Jedd Wolchok updates ecancertv on the latest advances in immunotherapy treatment for melanoma. There have two successful Phase III randomised trials demonstrating that ipilimumab can successfully treat advanced melanoma. Although the most recent of these trials have shown that the CTLA-4 blocking antibody can be successfully combined with dacarbazine, Prof Wolchok believes that vemurafenib, which has shown to prolong overall survival in patients with BRAF mutated melanoma, is much more likely to form the basis of future treatment combinations. Prof Wolchok concludes by discussing the search for a predictive biomarker for ipilimumab and explaining why the immune related toxicities occasionally caused by ipilimumab should not be considered to be an autoimmune response.