Successful Treatment and Five Years of Disease-free Survival in a Donor Transmitted Metastatic Melanoma with Ipilimumab Therapy

Approximately 7% of deceased donors have unknown cancer at the time of organ procurement. More than half of these have no apparent contraindication to organ donation. The commonest transmitted malignancy is renal cell cancer (19%), followed by melanoma (17%). Donor transmission of melanoma has been fatal in most cases as it is commonly metastatic at the time of diagnosis. Till date, there have been only a few cases with remission of melanoma following transplant nephrectomy and withdrawal of immunosuppression. To our knowledge, the evidence presented here is only the second case of donor-derived melanoma that was successfully treated with Ipilimumab. Our patient has the longest disease-free survival (five years) reported in the literature to date.