Nearly nine out of 10 patients with a rare and aggressive form of skin cancer that couldn’t be surgically removed responded to an FDA-approved immunotherapy, according to a recent study.

The research, published in Nature Medicine , involved 27 patients with unresectable desmoplastic melanoma who received Merck’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab) intravenously every three weeks for up to two years. The objective response rate in the study was 89%, and the complete response rate, or patients whose cancer went away entirely, was 37%.

“The promising results from this trial show that pembrolizumab can offer durable benefit for patients with a melanoma subtype that previously had no successful treatment options,” Antoni Ribas, M.D., the study’s senior author and director of the UCLA Health Jonsson

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