Adjuvant Immunotherapy of Resected, Intermediate-Thickness, Node-Negative Melanoma With an Allogeneic Tumor Vaccine: Overall Results of a Randomized Trial of the Southwest Oncology Group

Abstract

This represents one of the largest randomized, controlled trials of adjuvant vaccine therapy in human cancer reported to date. Compliance with randomization was excellent, with only 2% refusing assigned therapy. There is no evidence of improved disease-free survival among patients randomized to receive vaccine, although the power to detect a small but clinically significant difference was low. Future investigations of adjuvant vaccine approaches for patients with intermediate-thickness melanoma should involve larger numbers of patients and ideally should include sentinel node biopsy staging.