EvidenceMelanoma

Shows why single stories cannot settle the question: a melanoma this immunogenic can wax and wane on its own, and the improvement did not last.

Before 2011 median survival in metastatic melanoma was under a year; this trial shows that roughly half of patients treated with combination checkpoint blockade are now long-term survivors, effectively cured. It anchors first-line treatment of advanced melanoma and sets the benchmark for every new regimen, including nivolumab-relatlimab. The combination's toxicity means nivolumab alone or newer doublets remain reasonable for some patients.

For patients with advanced melanoma, immunotherapy offers a realistic chance of long-term survival and probably cure, and the ten-year data show that patients who are alive and progression-free at three years rarely die of melanoma afterwards. Nivolumab plus ipilimumab gives the best long-term results but at a high price in serious side effects; nivolumab alone or nivolumab plus relatlimab are alternatives for patients at lower risk or with autoimmune concerns. The trial is also a caution about surrogate endpoints: the survival plateau took years to become visible.

For the first time a randomised trial suggests that a vaccine tailored to an individual's tumour can reduce relapse when combined with immunotherapy, which is a proof of concept for a field that had failed for decades. Nothing changes for patients yet: the trial was small, the confidence interval crossed one, and the phase 3 trial in melanoma (and parallel trials in lung and other cancers) must confirm it. If it does, personalised mRNA vaccines could become a routine adjunct to checkpoint inhibitors after surgery.

Patients with melanoma that has spread to palpable lymph nodes should now be offered immunotherapy before rather than only after surgery: two cycles of low-dose ipilimumab with nivolumab, then surgery, with the pathology result deciding whether any more treatment is needed. Most patients respond well and are spared a year of adjuvant therapy. Serious side effects are more common than with nivolumab alone, mostly endocrine, and the approach requires close coordination between oncologists, surgeons and pathologists.

This series is the standard reference for US cancer numbers and the source of most headlines about cancer in younger adults. The gap between falling mortality and rising incidence is the argument for both continued treatment advances and stronger prevention and screening.

Pancreatic cancer was thought to be immunologically inert because of its low mutation burden; this study showed that with the right vaccine platform its few neoantigens can still be targeted. It is the strongest human evidence so far that personalised cancer vaccines can generate durable, tumour-specific immunity, and it justifies the randomised trials now running in pancreatic cancer and melanoma. Benefit is not yet proven, because responders may simply have had more immunogenic tumours.

Patients with newly diagnosed advanced melanoma have a dual-checkpoint option that improves on nivolumab alone with only a modest increase in serious side effects, making it attractive for those unable to tolerate or unwilling to risk the toxicity of ipilimumab. It did not prove superior survival, and it has not been compared with nivolumab plus ipilimumab, which remains preferred for patients with brain metastases or other high-risk features. LAG-3 is now an established target under study in many other cancers.

This trial supplied the randomised proof that was missing for TIL therapy and showed academic centres can run cell-therapy phase 3 trials without industry. It supports TIL as a standard option after checkpoint inhibitor failure in melanoma and underpinned reimbursement in the Netherlands. The comparator, ipilimumab, is itself only modestly effective in this setting, and overall survival did not differ significantly.

Checkpoint inhibitors are now given to hundreds of thousands of patients a year, many in community clinics and emergency departments, so a common, explicit playbook for their autoimmune side effects saves lives. The guideline standardised when to stop, when to give steroids and when to escalate, and made multidisciplinary toxicity teams routine. It does not remove the judgement needed for rare events or for patients whose cancer is responding.

Lifileucel proved that Steven Rosenberg's decades-old TIL concept could be industrialised into a licensed product and gave patients with checkpoint-refractory melanoma, who otherwise have few options, a chance of durable remission. It is the first cell therapy approved for any solid tumour. The treatment requires surgery to harvest tumour, hospitalisation for lymphodepletion and IL-2, and specialised centres, so its reach is limited.

This paper made AI-assisted skin cancer triage a serious clinical prospect and became the template for later work in radiology and pathology. Prospective trials, regulatory clearance and performance across skin tones followed, and are where its promise is now being tested.

This trial settled which checkpoint to block first in melanoma and set the pattern for PD-1 antibodies displacing ipilimumab across cancers. Long-term follow-up later showed that many responders remained free of progression years after stopping treatment.

This paper explained why PD-1 antibodies work in some patients and not others and introduced the idea of inflamed versus non-inflamed tumours that now guides combination strategies designed to bring T cells into cold tumours.

This study is why PD-1 inhibitors were developed across cancers rather than in melanoma alone: unexpected activity in lung cancer, historically thought immune-resistant, changed drug development priorities industry-wide. It also introduced PD-L1 immunohistochemistry as a candidate biomarker and pneumonitis as a signature toxicity. Within five years PD-1 blockade was approved in more than ten cancers.

This paper launched the immunotherapy era. It was the first randomised evidence that taking a brake off the immune system could extend life in a solid cancer, and it introduced clinicians to immune-related adverse events and to responses that arrive late or after apparent progression. Ipilimumab alone has since been superseded by PD-1 antibodies and combinations, but every checkpoint programme traces back to this result.

Every checkpoint inhibitor, from ipilimumab to pembrolizumab, rests on this idea: the immune system can already recognise cancer and just needs its brakes released. It changed the goal of immunotherapy from vaccinating against tumours to unleashing existing T cells.