The ultimate against melanoma

Until now, treatment options for people with advanced melanoma have been few and far between. However, at present, new drugs and chemotherapy and radiotherapy modalities are managing to increase the life expectancy of patients. We detail the latest against melanoma.

• Despite the fact that advanced melanoma is an incurable disease, new treatments are succeeding in significantly prolonging the survival of patients.
• Tailored treatment: the new treatments take into account the genetic and molecular profile of cancer cells in each patient, so they are much more precisely directed against them.
• Not all new drugs are routinely given anymore, although this will happen shortly.

What is your treatment based on now?

The treatment of melanoma is successful if the removal of the lesion is done early, before the invasion by the malignant cells does not go too deep into the skin. In more advanced stages, it is very likely that the melanoma has already spread to the nodes or other organs. The o currently used to date are not very effective for treatment and have not been able to significantly prolong patient survival.

What's New in Melanoma Chemotherapy?

The discovery of new pathways by which cancer cells grow and spread throughout the body is leading to the development of new drugs that can stop these pathways. These new treatments are of interest to patients with metastatic melanoma, that is, melanoma that has spread to other organs. They are basically two types of drugs:

• Ipilimumab: it is part of the medicines known as monoclonal antibodies. It does not attack cancer cells but activates the immune system to fight them. What it does is activate cells that fight against the tumor, T lymphocytes.
• Vemurafenib: is another monoclonal that prevents tumor cells from growing by blocking a gene called BRAF. It is only useful for patients who have a mutation in this gene, so it is not a suitable treatment for all cases. Approximately half of melanomas have the mutation so they can be treated with vemurafenib.

These drugs, as well as newer ones, can generally be given to patients in clinical trials. Not all of them are routinely administered anymore, although this will happen shortly.

What can these new drugs achieve?

Until now, treatment options for patients with advanced melanoma have been few and far between. At present, combinations of the new drugs mentioned with other chemotherapy and radiotherapy modalities are managing to increase the life expectancy of patients. Unfortunately, advanced melanoma remains an incurable disease. The goal of treatment should be to make it chronic for as long as possible, and to ensure an acceptable quality of life for patients.

cancer treatment in general is undergoing substantial transformation in recent years. The classic management with chemotherapy or radiotherapy is based on destroying the cancer cells as much as possible, avoiding producing great collateral damage in the rest of the cells of the body. The new treatments take into account the genetic and molecular profile of cancer cells in each patient, so they are much more precisely directed against them.

To select a treatment, complex genetic and molecular studies must first be carried out that draw a profile or "identity card" of the cancer in each patient. For this reason, we speak of "tailor-made" or "personalized" treatment for each case.