[Skin cancer melanoma]

The most common dermal malignancies are basal cell carcinoma, spinous cell carcinoma, and malignant melanoma, of which the latter two carry a poor prognosis. This communication deals with therapies for spinous cell carcinoma and malignant melanoma. Therapies for these malignancies have made huge strides, helping to formulate the policy and strategy for treatment and doing much to improve their prognoses. Chemotherapy, in particular, has become firmly established, contributing a great deal to the improvement of their prognoses. PEP, combination therapy with PEP plus MMC and CPT-11 are used for the treatment of spinous cell carcinoma, while CAV therapy is given to patients with advanced spinous cell carcinoma. In the treatment of malignant melanoma that is considered resistant to chemotherapy, DAV and PAV therapies have been attempted, and CDV and DACTam therapies have been tried on patients with advanced spinous cell carcinoma. Adoptive immunotherapy has also been used in the battle with this malignancy. Furthermore, excellent results have been observed with intratumor administration of IFN-beta. IFN-beta plus DAV has served well adjuvant therapy to improve the prognosis of Stage II or III malignant melanoma.