A revolution in the treatment of late-stage melanoma has been reached, with clinical trial results seeing surging survival rates.
Doctors are confident the new therapy approach, which will be subsidised by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), will overhaul the treatment of many types of deadly cancers.
A tumour the size of a golf ball saw death come knocking for Matthew Croxford.
“You think – is this it?” the 52-year-old father-of-two told 9News.
“And I had a lot of things to still achieve in my life.”
Croxford was offered to take part in an Australian and Netherlands-driven trial.
The new therapy has flipped the cancer paradigm on its head, by giving the body the best opportunity to activate its own cancer-fighting defences.
“It’s like the sniffer dogs that find the fruit and veg and drugs at the airport, they’re trained against what they need to find,” The Melanoma Institute’s Professor Georgina Long said.
“By giving immunotherapy before surgery, we train our immune system better against the cancer,” she said.
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Of the 423 patients with Stage 3 melanoma, one group received usual treatment with surgery first, then a single immunotherapy drug.
That order was then flipped for the other group, who were given two immunotherapy drugs first to shrink the tumour before surgery.
“Their chance of the melanoma coming back is next to zero – it’s less than five per cent,” Long said.
Such revolutionary results have seen the treatment approved to be funded by the PBS – a world first.
Australia has the highest rates of melanoma in the world, with one person diagnosed every 30 minutes and a life lost every six hours because of the disease.
Advances in treatment like this shift a diagnosis that has often been a death sentence to promising odds of survival.
“I’m effectively cancer-free, I have no side effects whatsoever, and I’m incredibly fortunate,” Croxford said.
The radical overhaul of traditional treatment is now being explored for other cancers, including lung, triple-negative breast cancer, kidney, head and neck cancers.
This new treatment for Stage 3 melanoma patients is to be listed on the PBS within months.
