A small study of an experimental drug for advanced melanoma — a brutal disease that often kills within nine months — is giving rare hope to doctors and patients.
For the first time, doctors say, new therapies that include the drug allow them to envision a time when they might be able to keep melanoma patients alive for years, treating the tumor like they would a chronic disease.

The pill, known as PLX4032, doesn’t cure melanoma, and it helps only the roughly 50% of melanoma patients whose tumors have a mutation in a key gene called BRAF. But among those patients in the study, 81% saw their tumors shrink. And for those 32 patients, the drug kept melanoma in check for a median of seven months, says the study’s lead author, Keith Flaherty of Massachusetts General Hospital.

No other drug has ever helped that high a percentage of patients with melanoma or any other solid tumor, says Paul Chapman, co-author of the study in today’s New England Journal of Medicine. The results are especially striking, he says, considering that only 10% to 20% of patients respond to standard treatments for melanoma, which don’t improve overall survival.

(Read More: USA Today)