User:Vincentso94/sandbox

 Immunotherapy 

Immunotherapy is aimed at stimulating the person’s immune system against the tumor, by enhancing the body's own ability to recognize and kill cancer cells. The current approach to treating melanoma with immunotherapy includes three broad categories of treatments including cytokines, immune check point inhibitors, and adoptive cell transfer. These treatment options are most often used in people with metastatic melanoma and significantly improves overall survival. However, these treatments are often costly. For example, one immune check point inhibitor treatment, pembrolizumab, costs $10,000 to $12,000 USD for a single dose administered every 3 weeks.

The two types of cytokine therapies used for melanoma include IFN-a and IL-2. IL-2 (Proleukin) was the first new therapy approved (1990 Europe, 1992 USA) for the treatment of metastatic melanoma in 20 years. Studies have demonstrated that IL-2 offers the possibility of a complete and long-lasting remission in this disease, although only in a small percentage of people. Intralesional IL-2 for in-transit metastases has a high complete response rate ranging from 40 to 100%. Similarly, IFN-a has shown only modest survival benefits and high toxicity, limiting its use as a stand alone therapy.

Immune check point inhibitors include anti-CTLA-4 monoclonal antibodies (ipilimumab and tremelimumab), toll-like receptor (TLR) agonists, CD40 agonists, anti-PD-1 (pembrolizumab, pidilizumab and nivolumab) or PDL-1 antibodies, and others. Of the mentioned therapies, anti-PD-1 antibodies have shown great promise and was found to be more effective than anti-CTLA4 antibodies with less systemic toxicity. However, many studies continue to demonstrate that the combination of different therapies can improve overall survival and progression-free survival compared to treatments alone.

Ongoing research is looking at treatment by adoptive cell transfer. For this purpose, application of pre-stimulated, modified T cells or dendritic cells is used to minimize complications from graft-versus-host disease.

 References 

Comments
You did a nice job here communicating evidence. I have a few notes: Thanks for sharing your suggested improvements! JenOttawa (talk) 17:00, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Replace the use of "patients" with people (Wikipedia style of communicating)
 * When inserting citations, they go immediately after the punctuation like this.1
 * You also did a nice job adding wikilinks. You may be able to add a few more, unless they are already linked earlier in the article (monoclonal abs and their names etc)
 * citation needed tag added above: add citations after every sentence, even if you have to re-use the same reference in a paragraph.

"Thanks for changing patients-->people. Be sure to sign in when editing Wikipedia! JenOttawa (talk) 11:00, 12 November 2018 (UTC)"