Targeted vs. Immunotherapy for BRAF-Mutated Metastatic Melanoma

For patients with BRAF-mutated metastatic melanoma, it is unclear whether immunotherapy or targeted therapy with BRAF inhibitors and MEK inhibitors should be used in the first-line setting.

To address this issue, investigators studied two BRAF-mutated melanoma cohorts: One cohort, treated with targeted therapy, comprised 93 patients, of whom 78 had the more common BRAFV600E mutation and 15 had the BRAFV600K mutation. The other cohort, treated with immunotherapy, comprised 103 patients, of whom 84 had the BRAFV600E mutation and 19 had the BRAFV600K mutation.

In the targeted-therapy cohort, patients with the BRAFV600E mutation had longer progression-free survival (PFS) than those with the BRAFV600K mutation. Conversely, in the immunotherapy coh…