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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.

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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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