Treating metastatic melanoma in 2014: what just happened and what is next?

In recent years the expectation related to treating patients with metastatic melanoma has changed. Three years ago, a diagnosis of metastatic melanoma was bleak; only a small number of patients would benefit from standard treatment and the reason for treatment benefit was often unknown, leaving physicians with limited options to help their patients. Today, just 3 years later, there are proven therapies that allow physicians to expect to shrink tumors and extend the lives of their patients after diagnosis. In this article, Paul B. Chapman, MD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, summarizes the recent advances in the field of metastatic melanoma and looks ahead to topics such as focusing on specificity, shutting down the ERK pathway, intermittent dosing, discovering driver mutations, individualizing checkpoint inhibition, and identifying rejection antigens to identify what should occur next in order to continue to improve outcomes for a larger population of patients with metastatic melanoma. Dr. Chapman's paper reminds us of the exciting progress that has been made while focusing on the work that is left in the field. Dr. Chapman is a physician-scientist who specializes in diagnosing and treating melanoma that has metastasized to other parts of the body. Dr. Chapman led a clinical trial that paved the way, in part, to the approval of vemurafenib-a drug that targets a BRAF mutation that is present in approximately 50% of patients with metastatic melanoma. Dr. Chapman is one of five Memorial Sloan Kettering scientists to be appointed to a melanoma "Dream Team" that focuses on identifying potential therapies for metastatic melanoma patients who do not have the mutated form of the BRAF gene. Dr. Chapman is also a professor of medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College and is the chair of the Melanoma Research Alliance Medical Advisory Board. In addition to the above, Dr. Chapman is a sought-after mentor for medical oncology fellows and has a current research interest in identifying novel means to more durably block signaling in the MAPK pathway in melanoma cells. Jedd Wolchok, MD, PhD, Scientific Program Committee Chair.