Targeted Therapy of Pediatric Cancer (2nd Edition)
A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Pediatric Oncology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 May 2026 | Viewed by 1313
Special Issue Editor
Interests: pediatric sarcoma; genetics; epigenetics; targeted therapy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue is the second edition of the Special Issue titled “Targeted Therapy of Pediatric Cancer”.
Today, more than 80% of children diagnosed with cancer can be cured. Nevertheless, cancer is still one of the most common causes of death in children and adolescents. Established therapies such as chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery have often reached their limits of toxicity, and further intensification of therapy seems impossible. In more than half of all cancer survivors, these therapies are associated with mutilation, intellectual disability, and/or genetic damage. At the same time, therapeutic success in refractory or recurrent tumors is unsatisfactory, with overall progression-free survival rates between 10 and 20% after two years, despite intensive multimodal treatment approaches.
Global (epi-)genetic NGS sequencing approaches have shown that pediatric tumors are fundamentally different from adult malignancies in terms of their cellular origin, epidemiology, lower mutational burden, driver mutations, and underlying mutational processes. In addition, they have established extensive molecular diagnostic pipelines to identify biomarkers and have identified potentially treatable mutations in 25–50% of pediatric tumors to date. These findings have led to novel targeted and immunotherapeutic treatment approaches and, in some patients with refractory cancers, to the exploration of these agents as components of first-line treatment.
However, it must also be noted that no effective therapeutic approaches have yet been identified for many tumor entities despite extensive molecular analyses. On the other hand, their development is very dynamic, and new intelligent preclinical models, such as immunotherapies with tumor-specific T cells, oncolytic viruses, PDX models, and phase II clinical trials with targeted therapeutics, are driving this development forward and giving rise to the hope that future treatments will have the potential to improve cure rates and reduce their impact.
The goal of this second Special Issue is to provide a platform for colleagues who are pursuing new, groundbreaking treatment approaches to present their findings. We aim to provide an overview of current developments in the field of molecular therapies, highlight advances in the use of targeted drugs and immunotherapies, and highlight issues that still need to be addressed in the treatment of pediatric tumors.
Prof. Dr. Günther H.S. Richter
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cancers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- leukemia
- lymphoma
- pediatric solid malignancies
- targeted therapy
- biomarker discovery
- actionable mutations
- drug vulnerabilities
- combination therapy
- immunotherapeutic approaches
- preclinical studies
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Related Special Issue
- Targeted Therapy of Pediatric Cancer in Cancers (5 articles)
