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Compared to early-stage melanoma when surgical excision is possible, metastatic disease continues to offer a much grimmer prognosis as traditional chemotherapy treatment regimens offer relatively little survival benefit. This has led to changes in treatment approaches over the preceding two decades as contemporary methods for the treatment of advanced or metastatic melanoma now involve a number of biological modalities, which include immunotherapeutic approaches, targeted therapies and epigenetic modification therapies. Clinically available immunotherapeutic agents include interleukin 2 (IL-2), as well as drugs targeting the important immune checkpoint molecules, such as cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) and programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1). The targeted therapeutic agents modulate specific pro-oncogenic mutations such as v-Raf murine sarcoma viral oncogene homolog B (BRAF), receptor tyrosine kinases, MEK inhibitors and potential future therapeutic targets, such as the CDK4/CDK6, PTEN and GNAQ/GNA11 genes. Additionally, an increasing understanding of the role of epigenetic alterations in the development and progression of melanoma now offers a new potential drug target. Several of these agents have shown promising results; however, in many investigations, combinations of different therapeutic approaches, each with different mechanisms of action, have yielded improved outcomes as treatment regimens continue to be further optimized by active research and patient disease sub-group analyses. This review summarizes the novel biological agents and new treatments, directly contributing to the significant improvement of biological therapies and markedly advancing knowledge of clinical application of newly approved and developed therapies in treatment of patients with metastatic melanoma., (Copyright© 2016 International Institute of Anticancer Research (Dr. John G. Delinassios), All rights reserved.)

Chest radiotherapy continues to play an important role in the treatment of breast cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, and other malignancies. Subsequent cardiac injury has been described involving essentially all structures of the heart, with most radiation-induced injury being progressive in nature. Our understanding over the multifactorial etiology and development of radiation-associated cardiac injury has advanced, leading to improved techniques aimed at decreasing cardiac radiation exposure and associated risks. Monitoring after radiotherapy clearly appears to be indicated; however, optimal recommendations regarding cardiac screening remain difficult to establish., (Copyright© 2015 International Institute of Anticancer Research (Dr. John G. Delinassios), All rights reserved.)

Summary: The accuracy of Bayesian phylogenetic inference using molecular data depends on the use of proper models of sequence evolution. Although choosing the best model available from a pool of alternatives has become standard practice in statistical phylogenetics, assessment of the chosen model's adequacy is rare. Programs for Bayesian phylogenetic inference have recently begun to implement models of sequence evolution that account for heterogeneity across sites beyond variation in rates of evolution, yet no program exists to assess the adequacy of these models. PuMA implements a posterior predictive simulation approach to assessing the adequacy of partitioned, unpartitioned and mixture models of DNA sequence evolution in a Bayesian context. Assessment of model adequacy allows empirical phylogeneticists to have appropriate confidence in their results and guides efforts to improve models of sequence evolution., Availability: This program is available as source code, a Java.jar application, and a native Mac OS X application. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License at http://code.google.com/p/phylo-puma.