Stage IV Melanoma Was a Death Sentence. Then Immunotherapy Changed Everything.
The CheckMate 067 trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that combining two immunotherapy drugs — nivolumab and ipilimumab — produces 7-year survival rates of 43% in patients with advanced melanoma. Before this era, the figure was roughly 5%. Here is the story of the most dramatic turnaround in cancer medicine of the past two decades, and what it means for anyone facing a melanoma diagnosis today.