Abstract
Emma Shtivelman1, Michael A. Davies2, Patrick Hwu2, James Yang3, Michal Lotem4, Moshe Oren5, Keith T. Flaherty6, and David E. Fisher6
1 Cancer Commons, Palo Alto, CA, USA
2 University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA
3 National Cancer Institute, NIH, Washington DC, USA
4 Hadassah Hebrew University Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel
5 The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
6 Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, MA, USA
Correspondence:
Emma Shtivelman, email:
Keywords: melanoma, targeted therapy, immune therapy
Received: March 19, 2014 Accepted: April 07, 2014 Published: April 08, 2014
Abstract
This review aims to summarize the current knowledge of molecular pathways and their clinical relevance in melanoma. Metastatic melanoma was a grim diagnosis, but in recent years tremendous advances have been made in treatments. Chemotherapy provided little benefit in these patients, but development of targeted and new immune approaches made radical changes in prognosis. This would not have happened without remarkable advances in understanding the biology of disease and tremendous progress in the genomic (and other “omics”) scale analyses of tumors. The big problems facing the field are no longer focused exclusively on the development of new treatment modalities, though this is a very busy area of clinical research. The focus shifted now to understanding and overcoming resistance to targeted therapies, and understanding the underlying causes of the heterogeneous responses to immune therapy.