Review Article Targeting Brain Metastases in Patients with Melanoma

Copyright © 2013 Dionysis Papadatos-Pastos 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. Patients with brain metastases from malignant melanoma historically have a very poor outcome. Surgery and radiotherapy can be used, but for themajority of patients the disease will progress quickly. In the recent past, patients with brainmetastases derived only minimal benefit from cytotoxic chemotherapy. Novel therapies that have been shown to be superior to chemotherapy in metastatic melanoma have made their way in clinic and data regarding their use in patients with treated or untreated brain metastases are encouraging. In this paperwe describe the use of vemurafenib, dabrafenib, and ipilimumab in patients withmelanoma disseminated to the brain in addition to other treatments currently in development. 1