Review Article Novel Approaches to Treatment of Advanced Melanoma: A Review on Targeted Therapy and Immunotherapy

Copyright © 2015 Anna Niezgoda et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The incidence ofmalignantmelanoma is increasing.Themajority of patients are diagnosed in early stages when the disease is highly curable. However, themore advanced ormetastatic cases have always been a challenge for clinicians.The poor prognosis for patients with melanoma is now changing as numerous of promising approaches have appeared recently. The discovery of aberrations of pathways responsible for intracellular signal transduction allowed us to introduce agents specifically targeting themutated cascades. Numerous clinical studies have been conducted to improve effectiveness ofmelanoma treatment. From 2011 until now, theU.S. FDA has approved seven novel agents, such as BRAF-inhibitors (vemurafenib 2011, dabrafenib 2013), MEK-inhibitors (trametinib 2013), anti-PD1 antibodies (nivolumab 2014, pembrolizumab 2014), anti-CTLA-4 antibody (ipilimumab 2011), or peginterferon-alfa-2b (2011) intended to be used inmost advanced cases ofmelanoma.Nevertheless, clinicians continueworking on newpossiblemethods of treatment as resistance to the novel drugs is a commonly observed problem. This paper is based on latest data published until the end of January 2015. 1