编者按:BRAF突变是黑色素瘤中常见的基因型改变,为此BRAF抑制剂也成为治疗黑色素瘤的重要靶向药物。那么,BRAF抑制剂的疗效究竟如何?何时开始使用效果最佳?有无相关预测因子可以评估其预期疗效?如何在BRAF抑制剂与其他治疗方法中做出选择?请关注本次《肿瘤暸望》对美国哈佛大学医学院附属丹娜法伯癌症研究院Keith Flaherty教授的专访。
Oncology Frontier: It sounds like the future is trying to phase out the old school chemotherapy.
《肿瘤瞭望》:未来传统化疗将逐步被淘汰?
Prof. Flaherty: Very much! At this point we certainly anticipated that might be the case with any agent that might come along and improve overall survival is both immunotherapy and BRAF inhibitor based therapy have would inherently be superior to chemotherapy which has never been able to produce survival impact in this disease. So we still consider chemotherapy for patients who lack a BRAF mutation and who have aggressive disease where we think immunotherapy unfortunately is not a great option; those patients arguably just don’t have good options and chemotherapy maybe a temporizing measure for a sub-population. For patients who have exhausted all of the treatment options available including BRAF inhibitor based therapy and are still candidates for treatment we do on occasion consider chemotherapy but it’s no better now than it was in years past in terms of the 10-20% response rate generally not particularly long lasting responses.
Oncology Frontier: As the chair of the 2014 Beijing International Melanoma Congress, do you have a message for Chinese colleagues working in the clinical and basic research?