Scotland approves targetted combination therapy for advanced melanoma
pharmafile | February 11, 2020 | News story | Manufacturing and Production | NHS, SMC, Scotland, UK, advanced melanoma, melanoma
The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) has approved targeted combination therapy for the treatment of adult patient with unresectable or metastatic melanoma with a BRAF V600 mutation.
The approval means that encorafenib plus binimetinibi will be used as the first and only targeted therapy available in Scotland for both treatment-naïve and previously treated settings.
This will help improve survival rates. It will more than double median progression-free survival from 7.3 months with BRAF inhibitor monotherapy to 14.9 months. It will also deliver median overall survival from 16.9 months with BRAF inhibitor monotherapy to 33.6 months.
The targeted therapy is already available in the rest of the UK. MASScot, a Scottish melanoma patient group, said the approval is something they have been “pleading for” for a long time. The number of deaths from the disease in Scotland has risen by 20% in the last twenty years.
Melanoma is one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer, and around half of the melanoma patients have a BRAF mutation which has a poorer prognosis and a higher risk of death when the cancer has spread.
Conor Kavanagh
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