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Immunotherapy

Does adjuvant ipilimumab have little adverse effect on quality of life?

Adjuvant ipilimumab is associated with an 11% improvement in 5-year overall survival in patients with high-risk melanoma, but at the cost of considerable toxicity, with half of patients discontinuing treatment owing to adverse events. An analysis of quality-of-life (QoL) outcomes, however, showed little impact of adverse effects of this treatment on QoL, which is puzzling.

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Correspondence to Paul Lorigan.

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P.L. is a member of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) Melanoma Group, where he chairs the Advanced Disease Subgroup. He had no involvement in EORTC 18071 trial, did not recruit patients to the trial, and was not privy to the results until they were published. P.L. has acted as a paid consultant/adviser to Amgen, BMS, GSK, MSD, Novartis, and Roche. He has received support for travel from BMS and MSD. A.G. declares no competing interests.

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Lorigan, P., Green, A. Does adjuvant ipilimumab have little adverse effect on quality of life?. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 14, 395–396 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2017.60

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