Molecular Decision Making in the Treatment of Colorectal Liver Metastases

Dear Colleagues,

The treatment of liver metastases from colorectal cancer has dramatically evolved during the last two decades: Parallel to the evolution of various multidrug systemic chemotherapy protocols, surgery has become a standard treatment with curative potential, and resectability has become a central treatment aim. Consequently, staged surgical concepts have been established and multimodality regimens with the aim of increasing resectability on the one hand and decreasing postoperative recurrence rates on the other are widely used in current practice.

Moreover, local ablative treatments and minimal-invasive surgery extend current treatment options with the aim of reducing morbidity in a multimodality treatment.

In addition to research on more efficient and better treatment regimen, the optimal treatment choice for an individual patient is currently a major challenge. Particularly in this setting, molecular tumor characteristics are gaining increasing importance in addition to established clinical scoring systems and histological parameters.

This open-access Special Issue is dedicated to reflect the most recent results on molecular selection criteria for chemotherapy as well as surgery and local ablative treatments in the treatment of liver metastases from colorectal cancer.

Therefore, topics of this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

• Molecular tumor pathology, angiogenesis, and signaling pathways;
• Tumor microenvironment;
• Cancer biomarkers: treatment response, prognosis;
• Cancer therapy: target discovery, drug design, resistance, targeted therapy, personalized medicine;
• Translational cancer research;
• High-throughput technologies: genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microarray, next generation sequencing, and other omics technologies;
• Genomic and proteomic databases and applications.

Dr. Stefan Heinrich
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 short 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. International Journal of Molecular Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. There is an Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal. For details about the APC please see here. 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.