Dr Georgina Long from Westmead Hospital and the Melanoma Institute Australia and colleagues report that combining the new drugs dabrafenib and trametinib provided a clinically meaningful improvement in progression-free survival, response rate and duration of response in 162 patients with melanoma that had BRAF V600 mutations. Patients in the study received either dabrafenib 150mg twice daily; twice-daily dabrafenib plus once-daily 1mg trametinib; or twice daily dabrafenib plus once-daily 2mg trametinib. The combination prolonged progresion free survival over single-drug therapy from 5.8 months to 9.4 months, which represents a 60% improvement. Among patients who received both drugs at the higher dose, 41% had not progressed 12 months after treatment began, compared to 9% in the monotherapy arm of the study.”The combination therapy of the BRAF inhibitor dabrafenib and the MEK inhibitor trametinib prolongs the progression-free survival in patients with V600 BRAF mutation-positive metastatic melanoma compared with dabrafenic monotherapy,” Dr Long said. “Importantly, the combination also decreases the rate of the cutaneous toxicities compared with dabrafenib monotherapy, particularly the oncogenic cutaneous toxicity of squamous cell carcinoma.”
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