In the previous decade major advances were made in targeted therapies as exemplified by the great progress in lung cancer. Today therapeutic innovation is dominated by the overwhelming breakthroughs in immunotherapy.1 This is particularly great news as these novel immunotherapeutic drugs work best in those cancers in which our targeted therapies fail: cancers with many mutations. There is a strong emerging interaction between targeted therapies and immunotherapy and it appears that targeted therapies silence oncogenic pathways that promote immune tolerance. For example BRAF inhibition with vemurafenib leads to expansion of T-cells infiltrating melanoma, a prerequisite for response to PD1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint inhibitors.
(BELG J MED ONCOL 2015;9:154–7)
