Two clinical trials suggest that drugs that help "supercharge" the body's immune system also show promise in treating advanced melanoma, a type of skin cancer, CBS News reported.

They both involved drugs called "immune checkpoint inhibitors," which prod the immune system to attack and destroy cancer cells, Suzanne Topalian told the network.

Topalian, the director of the Melanoma Program at the Johns Hopkins' Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore, explained that in the first study, one such inhibitor -- Keytruda -- managed to outperform the current frontline treatment for advanced melanoma -- Yervoy, another immune-boosting drug.

In the critical second trial, meanwhile, patients responded more favorably to a combination of two different types of inhibitors than to Yervoy used on its own, CBS News noted.

Stephen Hodi, the director of the Melanoma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and senior author of the second study, told the Wall Street Journal that the results had been remarkable enough to spark interest across and beyond the medical community.

"Given the high response rate and efficacy, (combining the drugs) has already become a major discussion we have with patients," Hodi noted.

He reported the findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, and they were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, the newspaper detailed.

Drugs that "supercharge" the body's immune system essentially make use of the body's own weapons, Forbes explained: They help dispatch "killer white blood cells," or "T cells" to fight the cancer, and the approach is "one of several bringing a huge amount of excitement to the field of cancer research," the magazine noted.

Jedd Wolchok -- the director of the Ludwig Collaborative Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, another lead author of the second study -- pointed to the promise that lies in stimulating an organism's natural defenses.

"To me it's a really graphic demonstration that the immune system is sitting there, waiting," he said. "And there are immune cells which are fully prepared to get rid of these tumors. But they are being held in check."