Clinical Outcomes of Advanced Cancer Patients Treated with Immune-Checkpoint Inhibitors: From the Inflamed Tumor to the Inflamed Patient

Dear Colleagues,

The new immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) has revolutionized oncology in the last decade. Despite outstanding and previously unpredictable results achieved for several solid tumors, a non-negligible rate of cancer patients still do not respond to ICIs, and there are no robust predictors of such primary refractoriness. The reasons for the lack of response to immune checkpoint blockades, together with the predictors of marked immune responsiveness, should be searched in the individual themselves as opposed to in his/her tumor, as the target of ICIs is no longer the tumor cell but the T-effector cells. In the patient-centric view, the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) modifications and its immunogenicity should be interpreted as the consequence of a systemic immune reaction provided by the host. Dysmetabolic conditions, the use of concomitant drugs, microbiota alterations, acute or chronic viral infections, surgical procedures, and a wide range of life events (e.g., pregnancy) may be responsible for different immune footprints on single individuals. The present Special Issue aims to collect evidence about these epiphenomena of an “inflamed patient”, whose tumor is likely to have been favored by immune suppression and to respond to an ICI-induced reversal of immune exhaustion.

Dr. Sebastiano Buti
Guest Editor

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• immunotherapy
• immune checkpoint inhibitor
• immunogenicity
• inflammation
• inflamed tumor
• inflamed patient
• immune response
• outcome prediction
• prognosis
• cancer patients
• solid tumors