RESEARCH ARTICLE
LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Management of Vemurafenib Induced Severe Arthralgia and Pyrexia in a Patient with BRAF V600E Mutated Melanoma: First Experience with a Switch to Dabrafenib
Lars Alexander Schneider*, 1, Peter Paschka2, Karin Scharffetter-Kochanek1, Verena Haftek2, Nicolai Treiber1, Margit Anna Huber1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 9
First Page: 1
Last Page: 3
Publisher ID: TODJ-9-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874372201509010001
Article History:
Received Date: 10/11/2014Revision Received Date: 28/12/2014
Acceptance Date: 30/12/2014
Electronic publication date: 20/2/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The invention of targeted therapy for BRAF mutated advanced stage melanoma has given the patients the perspective of a possible longer remission of the disease based on taking several pills a day without a further hospital stay. That is the ideal situation. However, the new drugs are not without side effects. Amongst them, fever and acute arthralgia are well known. We report on a patient in which these effects were so severe under vemurafenib that we had to stop the drug twice in the induction phase. Only with concomitant administration of corticosteroids finally a third induction worked. After 6 months on this therapy we switched the patient to dabrafenib and observed that in this case dabrafenib was much better tolerated. This is the second report on such a switch between the two licensed BRAF inhibitors because of side effects so far.