Immunotherapy is the hottest topic in cancer care today, and metastatic melanoma is among the first type to benefit from this fourth cancer therapy.

Two Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) medical oncologists, Drs. Shailender Bhatia and John Thompson, address the state of immunotherapy drugs, specifically PD-1 blockade, in the treatment of melanoma in the April 19, 2016 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“The tumor shrinkage seen with anti-PD1 immunotherapy in some patients shows that we are off to a promising start, but we still have a long way to go to fully understand the power of immunotherapy drugs,” says Dr. Thompson, co-director of SCCA’s Melanoma Clinic, member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and professor of medical oncology at UW School of Medicine.

In addition to offering a broad range of novel immunotherapies available only at SCCA and at limited sites around the country, SCCA is looking for biomarkers that correlate with efficacy outcomes.

“We have long known that immunotherapies can work really well for some of our patients, turning them into long-term survivors. Importantly, the quality of life of most patients is quite good while receiving some of the new immunotherapies. However, we still need to continue our research efforts to further improve our success rates with immunotherapy,” says Dr. Bhatia, medical oncologist at SCCA and assistant professor of medical oncology at UW School of Medicine. SCCA is currently planning a new, best-in-class clinical trials unit dedicated to immunotherapy.