Chemotherapeutic approaches to soft tissue sarcomas.

Conventional chemotherapy for adult type soft tissue sarcomas is not very effective. Rarely are patients with advanced soft tissue sarcomas curable by systemic chemotherapy. Thus, the benefits from chemotherapy have been equivocal even when treatment is given postoperatively to patients whose primary sarcomas have been excised. Current research is directed toward the achievement of a high percentage of complete tumor regressions in patients with advanced metastatic disease in hope that this can be translated into truly effective adjuvant therapy. Several recent new approaches to systemic treatment for soft tissue sarcomas are assessed including prospects for possible enhancement of chemotherapy by agents which stimulate cellular immunity. Some unexpectedly favorable responses to chemotherapy+granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) in an ongoing study are discussed.