White Hair Means Better Prognosis for Melanoma Patients

If your hair is white, normally that means you are old or getting old. But if your hair turns white while you are taking some medications to treat melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, it means you have a better prognosis.

A new study showed patients whose hair turned white while using Bristol-Myers Squibb's ipilimumab and Pfizer's tremelimumab all had a complete response to the therapy, meaning that there were no detectable tumors on CT scans after treatment.

The trial of 48 patients with melanoma led by Dr. Anna Pavlick, director of the melanoma program at New York University's Langone Medical Center showed 17 patients had partial or complete response to the treatment.

Of the 17 patients, nine whose hair turned completely white, a phenomenon called depigmentation, six months to one year after the therapy got started, responded to the treatment completely.

The two drugs are so called anti-CTLA-4 Monoclonal Antibodies.  The drugs block CTLA-4 and enhance antitumor responses by allowing the immune system to maintain responsiveness against an antigen.

Invasive melanoma is the fifth leading cancer in men and women. There is no effective treatment.  Melanoma immunotherapy has been recently reported as a promising therapy.

Researchers from the Netherlands found an immunotherapy consisting of imiquimod and a skin-depigmenting agent monobenzone and another adjuvant effective in inducing a melanoma antigen-specific immune response.

The therapy tested in mice stopped melanoma growth in up to 85 percent of the mice.  The study was conducted by van den Boorn J.G. and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and published in the May 2010 issue of PLoS One.

Melanoma is diagnosed in 60000 men and women in the United States and the disease kills about 6000 each year in the country, according to the American Cancer Society.