Cytokine-based therapy for melanoma: pre-clinical studies

Incidence and mortality of human malignant melanoma has risen rapidly over recent decades. Systemic therapies for metastatic cutaneous melanoma, the most aggressive of all skin cancers, remain disappointing although immunological treatment has been more successful for melanoma than for most other tumours. With the availability of recombinant cytokines, immunotherapy for melanoma has entered a new era and a growing body of evidence suggests the efficacy of these approaches in pre-clinical models. Cytokine gene transfer to tumour cells has been demonstrated to induce tumour rejection in different murine melanoma models suggesting that vaccination with tumour cells genetically engineered to produce cytokines is an attractive strategy to enhance anti-tumour immune responses in patients with melanoma. Taken together, these data may hold significant promise for the development of effective ex vivo and in vivo systemic and gene therapy modalities to counter the highly metastatic nature of human melanoma.