A pair of cancer drugs can go a long way towards treating Melanoma, the scourge of Australia and New Zealand.  An international on more than 900 people found that the drug combination could shrink melanoma in almost 60 percent of patients.

Cancer Research UK said the drugs Ipilimumab and Nivolumab deliver a “powerful punch” against one of the most aggressive forms of cancer.  Ipilimumab and Nivolumab both signal the body’s immune system to attack Melanoma.  The international trial on 945 people showed that taking both drugs led to tumors shrinking by at least a third in 58 percent patients of patients – with the tumors stable or shrinking for an average of 11.5 months. 

“By giving these drugs together you are effectively taking two brakes off the immune system rather than one so the immune system is able to recognize tumors it wasn’t previously recognizing and react to that and destroy them,” said Dr. James Larkin of the UK’s Royal Marsden Hospital.  “For immunotherapies, we’ve never seen tumor shrinkage rates over 50 percent, so that’s very significant to see.”

The figures appear in The New England Journal of Medicine.  Both Ipilimumab and Nivolumab were developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb.  But other big pharmaceuticals are developing similar cancer drugs that trigger the immune system into doing the heavy lifting.

The government’s latest figures show that Melanoma of the skin was the fourth most-commonly diagnosed cancer in Australia, as of 2010.   In 2014, more than 14,240 Australians were expected to be diagnosed with melanoma of the skin.