Targeted therapy for malignant melanoma.

There has been much development in the field of targeted therapy for melanoma stemming from efforts to decrease treatment-related toxicities and enhance specific cytotoxicity. This review focuses on three modalities of targeted melanoma therapy based on the biology of the targeting mechanism. The first of these modalities is immunotherapy, which functions to generate a specific antimelanoma immunity. A second modality utilizes metabolic pathways of melanin synthesis to target melanoma cells specifically. A third modality ensues from recent advances in molecular biology and the identification of genes responsible for the malignant transformation of normal melanocytes to melanomas. This work has furthered our understanding of the basis of malignancy, as well as the development of novel strategies aimed at targeting aberrant growth in melanoma.