We read with interest the article by Uprety et al. on the melanoma survival between contemporary periods depending on the approval time of immunotherapy [1]. I want to congratulate the authors for this fruitful article and make some contributions.
In the study, it has been indicated that the immunotherapy era was significantly added benefits to overall survival (OS) for melanoma patients; however, the rare sites of melanoma should be included in these two contemporary groups. Unluckily, the patients with these relatively rare melanoma subtypes (acral lentiginous, uveal, and mucosal melanomas) which typically do not respond to the emerging immunotherapy that has been approved for the more common type of melanoma, and thus have worse overall survival rates [2] and attempting to reach enduring safe and effective responses in these high-risk subtypes of melanoma is one of the field's main challenges [3].
We searched for the distant rare subtypes of melanoma (Stage - 6th edition. Derived AJCC M, 6th ed (2004-2015) from Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program (www.seer.cancer.gov) SEER*Stat Database 3.8.9 version: Incidence - SEER Research Data, 18 Registries, Nov 2019 Sub (2000-2017), and follow-up. We revealed that there was no significant difference in survival between immunotherapy and non-immunotherapy era p = 0.31. Figure 1 Our findings give more attention to the clinician in practice with the rare melanoma subtypes in the era of immunotherapy.
FIGURE 1
Kaplan Meier–OS difference between rare subtypes of melanoma (p = 0.31). 1- Immunotherapy era. 2- non-immunotherapy era.
We strongly highlight effective clinical and preclinical studies toward these rare subtypes of melanoma, including the combination of immunotherapy and anti-vascular agents (NCT03955354, NCT03991975, NCT03602547), new immune checkpoint inhibitors (NCT02071940 with an anti-CSF1) and cell-based approaches (NCT01983748) [3, 4].
Statements
Author contributions
These authors have contributed equally to this work and share the first authorship.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
References
1.
Uprety D Bista A Chennamadhavuni A Niroula A Jafri SIM Smith A et al Survival trends among patients with metastatic melanoma in the pretargeted and the post-targeted era: a US population-based study. Melanoma Res (2018) 28(1):56–60. 10.1097/cmr.0000000000000394
2.
Rodrigues M de Koning L Coupland S Jochemsen A Marais R Stern M-H et al So close, yet so far: discrepancies between uveal and other melanomas. A position paper from um cure 2020. Cancers (2019) 11(7):1032. 10.3390/cancers11071032
3.
Alicea GM Rebecca VW . Emerging strategies to treat rare and intractable subtypes of melanoma. Pigment Cel Melanoma Res. (2021) 34(1):44–58. 10.1111/pcmr.12880
4.
Rapisuwon S Qin Y Roszik J Carapeto F Patel S Carvajal RD . Systemic therapy for mucosal, acral, and uveal melanoma. Cutan Melanoma (2020) 1301–35. 10.1007/978-3-030-05070-2_62
Summary
Keywords
melanoma, SEER database, immunotherapy, survival, epidimiology
Citation
Safi M, Trapani D, Alradhi M, Shan X and Jiwei L (2021) No Overall Survival Difference in the Immunotherapy Era for Rare Subtypes of Melanoma. Pathol. Oncol. Res. 27:639004. doi: 10.3389/pore.2021.639004
Received
08 December 2020
Accepted
15 March 2021
Published
17 June 2021
Volume
27 - 2021
Edited by
József Tímár, Semmelweis University, Hungary
Updates
Copyright
© 2021 Safi, Trapani, Alradhi, Shan, Jiwei.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Mohammed Safi, Mhosafi86@gmail.com; Liu Jiwei, jiweiliudl@gmail.com
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