Harnessing the immune system for the treatment of melanoma: current status and future prospects

ABSTRACT

When malignant melanoma is diagnosed early, surgical resection is the intervention of choice and is often curative, but many patients present with unresectable disease at later stages. Due to its complex etiology paired with well-documented chemoresistance and high metastatic potential, patients with advanced melanoma had a poor prognosis, and the treatment of this disease remained unsatisfactory for many years. Recently, targeted therapy, immune checkpoint inhibition, or combinatory approaches have revolutionized the therapeutic options of melanoma allowing considerable improvement in disease control and survival. In this review we will summarize these novel therapeutic strategies with particular focus on combinatory immunotherapies and further discuss recent data derived from immunogenomic studies and potential options to improve the therapeutic efficacy of immune modulatory approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Malignant melanoma
• combination therapy
• immunotherapy
• immune checkpoint blockade
• CTLA-4 inhibitors
• PD-1 inhibitor
• PD-L1 inhibitors
• abscopal effect

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.