This week, Bobbi Conner talks with Dr. Russell Jenkins about new treatments for advanced melanoma. Dr. Jenkins is an Associate Professor of Medicine and an oncologist specializing in treating melanoma at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center.
TRANSCRIPT:
Conner: I'm Bobbi Conner for South Carolina Public Radio with Health Focus here at the radio studio for the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. In recent years, new treatments have been developed to treat advanced melanoma. Doctor Russell Jenkins is here to talk about the details. Doctor Jenkins is an Associate Professor of Medicine, and he's an oncologist specializing in treating melanoma at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center. Doctor Jenkins tell us about melanoma skin cancer.
Dr. Jenkins: Melanoma is a cancer that starts in the skin in the vast majority of patients. There are exceptions to that rule, but we really think of melanoma as a skin cancer. And, it's caused by damage from the sun. And it can be only a couple bad sunburns when you're a youngster, that we think might be enough to increase the risk, which is a little different than other types of skin cancer. Melanoma is not the most common skin cancer, but it is definitely the most lethal.
Conner: Well, what are the treatment approaches when melanoma is detected early.
Dr. Jenkins: When melanoma is detected early, and it's usually detected by a visit to the dermatologist, the idea is to get all of the melanoma out surgically as best as possible. And, in the vast majority of patients, surgery is curative.
Conner: Tell us about the new treatments for more advanced melanoma.
Dr. Jenkins: So, the patients that I see are the patients that have already gone through their journey of seeing the dermatologist, and sometimes even the surgical oncologist. And melanoma has sometimes come back in ways that surgery would be complex or sometimes not even possible. And when that's the case, we use systemic treatments, treatments that work throughout the body. And, the improvements in the survival and outcomes for patients with advanced melanoma has largely been driven by success with cancer immunotherapy. Cancer immunotherapy is not a single drug. It's a class of medications. And these are medications that help to reinvigorate, reeducate and reactivate the immune system, and, helping your own immune system do the heavy lifting of fighting the cancer. And we have multiple immunotherapy drugs that we can use for our patients. And we try to match the particular immunotherapy offering with what that particular patient is experiencing.
Conner: Are there other new treatments on the horizon or even being used related to advanced cases of melanoma?
Dr. Jenkins: I'd say there's been two really big advances in the last 2 to 3 years. The first is using a little bit of immunotherapy before a patient has surgery in some instances. And this has been shown to reduce both the amount of immunotherapy and the amount of surgery that patients may need. And that's for patients with a more limited form of advanced melanoma where it hasn't spread throughout the body but has come back in a couple of places. The second instance is when we've already used what we call our frontline treatments, meaning the best standard treatments that are FDA approved, and in spite of that best treatment, the melanoma has figured out a way to grow. And, that new form of treatment that is now FDA approved and MUSC is an authorized treatment center, is for what we call TIL therapy or tumor infiltrating lymphocyte therapy.
Conner: And I understand there's work being done to possibly develop vaccines for melanoma.
Dr. Jenkins: That's correct. Cancer vaccines have been attempted for a while, but there's now a sense that we can combine a different form of cancer vaccine with these other immunotherapy drugs. And, that seems to be particularly effective at reducing the risk of recurrence of melanoma after surgery. And these are currently in clinical trials right now. They're not FDA approved, although there's great optimism that they may be available in the coming years.
Conner: Doctor Jenkins, thanks for talking with us about melanoma.
Dr. Jenkins: Thank you for having me.
Conner: From the radio studio for the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, I'm Bobbi Conner for South Carolina Public Radio.
Health Focus transcripts are intended to accurately represent the original audio version of the program; however, some discrepancies or inaccuracies may exist. The audio format serves as the official record of Health Focus programming.
