Cancer Immunotherapy: Current Advancements and Future Perspectives
A special issue of Journal of Personalized Medicine (ISSN 2075-4426). This special issue belongs to the section "Methodology, Drug and Device Discovery".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 January 2025 | Viewed by 9121
Special Issue Editors
Interests: experimental oncology; in vitro model of cancer; experimental radiotherapy in vitro and in vivo; cancer genomics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Even if target therapy has been conceived to dramatically improve the therapeutic outcomes in oncology, the real-life impact of this approach is still limited when considering its actual efficacy in tumor eradication. Complete and sustained long-term responses to anticancer therapies represent minority events in the vast therapeutic scenario in oncology, especially for some cancers such as melanoma, breast cancer, or brain tumors. The goal of immune therapy is to elicit and maintain an immune mediation response to cancer cells to establish a self-sustained process. For some specific applications, this approach demonstrates its significant effectiveness in diseases where therapeutic options are not particularly effective. Promising results have already been achieved in melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, and renal cell carcinoma. Other encouraging data are available for breast and bladder cancers and some myelomas and lymphomas. Unfortunately, the percentage of patients who benefit from these treatments remains limited, underlining the need to identify useful predictive features for their use. Several useful parameters have been considered to direct this therapeutic strategy, including the PD-L1 expression, lymphocytic infiltration, tumor mutational burden, microsatellites instability, and tumor inflammation signature. Regarding radiotherapy, it is well-known that it can induce abscopal and bystander effects by recruiting immune cells against the tumor. Unfortunately, such responses are episodic and not systematically inducible. These may be synergized and promoted by immunotherapy. Cutting-edge discoveries in this field explain the underlying cellular cascades that are waited for methodically to trigger these dramatic events in metastatic cancer patients. Modulating the radiation dose in terms of both size (such as in stereotactic body radiation therapy) and spatial delivery pattern (such as in the various spatially fractionated radiation therapy forms) is supposed to be a key factor to engage these off-target effects. Bench-to-bedside and vice versa findings are welcome in this Special Issue to shed light on the rationale and mechanisms of these new therapeutic opportunities.
The challenge is, therefore, to be able to develop immunotherapeutic strategies that meet the criteria of tolerability, manageability, efficacy, and that are economically sustainable. The weapon of immunotherapy should be made effective for a larger number of patients. It is also important to effectively combine immunotherapy with chemotherapy, radiotherapy or targeted therapies aiming towards a complete and sustainable disease eradication.
Dr. Stefano Forte
Dr. Gianluca Ferini
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- personalized immunotherapy
- molecular pathways in cancer immunotherapy
- precision medicine
- molecular markers
- molecular bases of abscopal effect
- sustained therapeutic response
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