According to a story from Biopharma Dive, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently approved a treatment for a rare form of melanoma that affects the eyes, called uveal melanoma. The therapy was created by the biotech company Immunocore, which is based in the UK. The drug is called Kimmtrak and marks the first ever approval for this disease. It’s also the first drug approval for the company.

About Uveal Melanoma

Typically melanoma is known as a cancer that appears on the skin in cells called melanocytes, and in this form it is quite common, affecting millions of people yearly. However, more rarely, melanoma can also appear in the eyes, known as uveal melanoma. After all, melanocytes, or pigment cells, are present in the eyes as well. While regular melanoma is linked to UV light exposure, it is unclear what causes uveal melanoma. People with lighter skin and blue eyes are at greater risk They can appear in any part of the uvea, which includes the iris, the choroid, or the ciliary body. Treatments include radiation therapy, removal of the affected eye, proton therapy, and thermotherapy. The five year survival rate is just 15 percent if the cancer spreads beyond the eye. To learn more about uveal melanoma, click here.

About The Treatment

Kimmtrak uses a unique mechanism and can be described as a T-cell receptor that has been fused to a protein which connects immune system cells to the cancer. Like many rare cancer therapies, Kimmtrak will have an astronomical price tag averaging around $400,000. The drug outperformed other potential treatments in clinical trials, with 73 percent of uveal melanoma patients who received Kimmtrak still being alive after one year since the study start. This figure was only 59 percent in the patients that were treated with other drugs.

The drug also showed greater ability to delay disease spread; 31 percent of those treated showed no progress six month after starting treatment, compared to 19 percent of those treated with other drugs, which included Keytruda, dacarbazine, and Yervoy. Side effects were also generally found to be manageable, though less than one percent of patients had cytokine release syndrome, a strong reaction to T-cell derived therapies that can be potentially life threatening.

This treatment has the potential to help prolong survival for patients living with the rare cancer uveal melanoma.