Treatment options for metastatic melanoma. A systematic review

Summary Metastatic melanoma is considered to be one of the most resistant tumors to standard chemotherapy approaches nowadays. Old anti-cancer treatments like dacarbacin (DTIC) or interleukin-2 (IL-2) continue to be the only approved treatments by the main worldwide health authorities. Up to now, no combination or new anti-targeted agent has shown an improvement in overall survival when compared to either of these two drugs alone. In fact, more than a dozen phase III randomized trials have tried to go beyond these old approaches, without meeting any success. Despite the fact that the median overall survival of patients diagnosed with metastatic melanoma is lower than 9 months, melanoma emerges as a challenging disease for testing new drugs and implementing the deeper knowledge in the molecular biology underlying this tumor. New immunotherapeutic targets have appeared recently trying to modulate the host immune response against the tumor. Furthermore, in the last three years, new targeted agents have changed the standard of care of other solid tumor types like renal cancer. We wonder if these new agents will be incorporated in the standard management of advanced melanoma patients in the coming years.