Targeted Therapy of Melanoma

In recent years, the treatment of advanced melanoma has been revolutionized by the introduction of new innovative approaches, namely mutation-based targeted therapy and immune checkpoint blockade by CTLA4 and PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors. The decade-long era of chemotherapy with very low response rates of 5-20% and short median survival rates of 6-9 months has been left in favor of new therapies with response rates ranging between 40% and 70% and median overall survival rates of 2 years and longer (Heppt et al., 2015, Larkin et al., 2014, Long et al., 2015, Long et al., 2016, Schadendorf et al., 2015).