[Therapy of cutaneous melanoma]

Therapy of melanoma considers the individual prognosis. Primary low-risk melanomas with tumor-thickness below 1 mm can be treated by surgery with a safety margin of 1 cm. If the tumor-thickness is more than 2 mm the safety margin should be 3 cm. Elective lymph node dissection for melanomas at the extremities is widely substituted by the sentinel lymph node procedure. This new technique shall be applied only in specialised centers in the context of clinical trials. After the resection of lymph node metastases adjuvant treatment using Interferon-alpha should be considered. Palliative therapy of metastases includes surgery, radiotherapy and chemo-immunotherapy depending on the number and location of the metastases. Recent progress in understanding the immunobiology of melanoma and the development of gene therapy has offered new perspectives for future therapeutical intervention including peptide vaccination alone or loaded on dendritic cells and gene therapy.