One drug for two skin cancers?

We are excited to publish our article entitled “Incidence of Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) and Squamous Cell Carcinomas (SCC) in Patients on Anti-Programmed Cell Death-1 Therapy (anti-PD1) for Metastatic Melanoma” in the Journal of Immunotherapy.
BCCs and SCCs are the bread and butter of dermatology in Australia. This is the first study comparing the incidence of BCC and cutaneous SCC, in patients receiving immunotherapies or targeted therapies for metastatic melanoma, to a control group of patients with similar risk factors.
The most important finding in our study is that patients on anti-PD1 had 8.33 times less the risk to develop BCC (p=0.006) than the control patients on therapy. This landmark finding strongly implicates further cellular and clinical studies investigating the role of anti-PD1 for BCC prevention and treatment.