Advances in treatment of melanoma with immunotherapy / 肿瘤

ABSTRACT

Immunotherapy, primarily headed by immune checkpoint inhibitors, has become a standard, first-line therapeutic methodin treatment for patients with melanoma. Combination immunotherapy, that is the combination of programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) inhibitor and cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen-4 (CTLA-4) inhibitor, further enhanced the anti-tumor efficacy, improved the objective response rate, and extended both the overall and progressionfree survival of patients in the past years. Therefore, combination immunotherapy has also become a new direction for the treatment of melanoma. Meanwhile, the anti-tumor effects and clinical outcomes of combination immunotherapy in other types of tumors are also encouraging. Combination immunotherapy offers a new treatment option for patients, but there are still many issues that need to be further discussed. In order to maximize the benefit of patients, more large-scale clinical researches are needed to answer the questions which may strongly affect the clinical decisions, such as, how to optimize the regimens of combination therapy, how to identify the appropriate treatment population, and how to balance the risk-benefit ratio of patients.