Successes and Limitations of Targeted Cancer Therapy in Melanoma

The treatment of stage IV melanoma has witnessed a very impressive pace of innovation in recent years, to a point where the management of these patients has very little in common to what was standard practice 5 years ago. If the gain in overall survival, the high response rates or the induction of a significant fraction of long survivors are all very exciting news for our patients and their families, the path that led to these discoveries is as important. Rather than empirical, the development of these new strategies has been extremely rational, based on state-of-the-art basic biology and immunology, exemplary translational research and, finally, hypothesis-driven targeted trials that led to rapid approval. In this review, we will cover all the new targeted therapies that have emerged as the results of these translational programs, focusing mainly on signaling pathway-and immune check-point- targeted therapies. Taken collectively, these new developments set the bar for a new paradigm in future translational and clinical research in both melanoma as well as other tumor types. (C) 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel