Immunotherapy of Melanoma

Abstract

Malignant melanoma is a disease characterized by clinical evidence of host defense, possibly immunologically mediated. It is a disease which tends to be refractory to both radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Immunotherapy has been used in three phases of the disease. 1. Intralesional immunotherapy with a nonspecific immune adjuvant in patients with local intradermal or soft tissue recurrence. This treatment produces approximately 15% regression of both injected and uninjected lesions, and about 60% regression of injected lesions only. Both clinical and laboratory evidence suggests that this regression is immunologically mediated. 2. Patients with surgical removal of all clinically demonstrable tumor, either primary disease alone or regional node recurrence, active nonspecific, and specific, immunotherapy has been used in an adjuvant setting. There is considerable controversy about the benefits accruing to such immunotherapy, but most large scale prospective and randomized studies have suggested that if benefit does result it is modest in degree and probably cannot be measured in terms of increase in cure rate. 3. Immunotherapy has also been used as a nonspecific active adjuvant to single drug or polychemotherapy in patients with disseminated melanoma. Whereas complete response rate may be slightly increased by this maneuver there is no convincing evidence that immunotherapy markedly increases the total objective response rate to polychemotherapy, and survival is only marginally superior when immunotherapy is added to chemotherapy in this setting. Further studies need to be done with active specific immunotherapy with tumor cell membrane extracts; as an adjuvant in patients with minimal body burden of tumor cells; and to study the inaction between chemotherapy and immunotherapy in this disease. Furthermore, studies of chemically defined fractions of either bacterial cell wall or tumor cell extracts must be evaluated both in terms of their ability to augment cell mediated immune responses in the melanoma patient, and also in terms of their ability to induce objective benefit for the patient. The possible use of immunotherapy in patients with primary melanoma has been briefly explored but needs further study. Possible additive effects with radiotherapy and immunotherapy should also be looked at in this disease utilizing high dose fractions and other new forms of radiotherapeutic technique.

True

“…The BCG vaccine has been used to induce anti-cancer immune responses nearly as long as it has been used against TB (Nathanson, 1979). In randomized studies it appears to have a small but not significant difference in the treatment of leukaemia, melanoma and prostate cancer (Cascinelli et al, 1989;Guinan et al, 1982;Nathanson et al, 1979;Tan and Ho, 1993;Vuvan et al, 1978;Zuthrie et al, 1980).…”

Allergic contact sensitivity to BCG

“…The BCG was administered by scarification at 4 different sites (upper arms and thighs) at weekly intervals. Each scarification was made with one vial (6X 10 8 viable organisms) oflyophilized BCG Pasteur F. Extensive contact dermatitis was observed in 2 patients after the 6th inoculation, in another 2 patients after the lOth inoculation, and in 2 patients after the 19th and 24th inoculations (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11). The rash developed simultaneously at a114 sites.…”