Novel treatment strategies for soft tissue sarcoma

Soft tissue sarcoma is a heterogeneous group of rare tumours arising predominantly from the embryonic mesoderm. While the prognosis is excellent for patients diagnosed at an early stage and treated by adequate surgery, unresectable or advanced metastatic diseases shrink the overall survival at 5 years dramatically to less than 10%. For metastatic soft tissue sarcoma, the armamentarium of effective chemotherapeutic agents is limited, especially when patients failed anthracycline- and/or ifosfamide-based chemotherapy. Fortunately, progress in the understanding of molecular biology and pathogenesis of soft tissue sarcomas has been made recently and should in the near future translate into molecular tumour characterization and the development of new therapeutic strategies. In this review, we briefly describe the status of current treatment strategies for soft tissue sarcoma. We will focus on the new and emerging compounds including recent developments of targeted therapy and cytotoxics such as antiangiogenic and immunomodulatory drugs, Bcl-2 antisense therapy, raf kinase inhibitors, heat shock protein modulators, anti-cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen (CTLA)-4 monoclonal antibody, proteasome inhibitors, minor groove binders, topoisomerase I inhibitors, and other agents being extensively developed in these solid tumours. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.