Name: Are there safety concerns with using biologics in patients with a history of melanoma?
Uploaded: 2021-12-30T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Are there safety concerns with using biologics in patients with a history of melanoma?

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Dermbits

MD, PhD

Are there safety concerns with using biologics in patients with a history of melanoma?

Psoriasis

You. When we look at big data sets, we know a few things about cancer risk and patients with psoriasis. So, one, we know that patients with psoriasis do have a higher overall malignancy risk than matched patients who don't have psoriasis. This seems to be more so disease specific than treatment specific. However, when we look at the specific cancer that come out, it's usually more hematologic malignancies and not solid tumors such as melanoma. There have been, however, several case reports of patients who have been on TNF inhibitors who had a history of invasive melanoma presenting later with distant metastases. So for this reason, we do tend to try to avoid TNF inhibitors, specifically in patients who have a history of invasive melanoma. There have been a couple studies that are not clinical trials, but interesting lately looking at cytokine expression within tumors. One of the tumors looked at was melanoma. And so it turns out that low expression of TnF alpha or il twelve beta was associated with a worse prognosis than melanoma. So that would suggest that perhaps these signs do impact prognosis. So I think avoiding TNF inhibitors and potentially il twelve inhibitors in patients with melanoma makes sense, particularly since we have a lot of other options.

Are there safety concerns with using biologics in patients with a history of melanoma?

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