Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to invite you to the next PIVAC meeting, entitled “The 23rd International Conference on Progress in Vaccination Against Cancer” (PIVAC-23), which will be held from 28th to 30th September 2023 at the Saint Savas Cancer Hospital, 171 Alexandras avenue, Athens, Greece. PIVAC-23 aims to connect scientists working in translational and clinical cancer research for three days of presentations on the most recent advances in the following fields: (i) immunotherapies (cellular, immune checkpoint blockade, vaccines); (ii) innate immunity and tumor control; (iii) host–tumor interactions in the tumor microenvironment; (iv) in vitro and in vivo models for cancer immunotherapies; (v) combinational cancer therapy approaches; and (vi) prognostic and predictive biomarkers in tumors and immune cells.

The website of PIVAC 23 is https://scep.gr/en/events/event/pivac2023/

You are cordially invited to submit your unpublished original work attending to recent advances in all aspects of computational methods related to cancer research for the following topics:

cancer biomarkers for prognosis and prediction
understanding TCR specificity and cross-reactivity for predicting epitope immunogenicity
the tumor microenvironment and regulation of antitumor immunity
immunotherapies and immune resistance
cancer immunotherapies

Dr. Constantin N. Baxevanis
Dr. Sotirios P. Fortis
Dr. Maria Goulielmaki
Guest Editors

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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Onco is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1000 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

cancer immunotherapy
cancer vaccines
immune resistance
tumor microenvironment
biomarkers

Published Papers (2 papers)

Download All Papers

Review

Jump to: Other

10 pages, 612 KiB

Open AccessReview

Dendritic Cell Immunotherapy for Ovarian Cancer: An Overview of Our Achievements

by Jiřina Bartůňková

Onco 2024, 4(1), 46-55; https://doi.org/10.3390/onco4010004 - 21 Mar 2024

Viewed by 553

Abstract

Epithelial ovarian carcinoma (EOC) is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related death in women, largely reflecting the early dissemination of this malignant disease to the peritoneum. Due to its immunological features, EOC has poor response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), including a limited tumor mutational burden (TMB), poor infiltration by immune cells, and active immunosuppression. Thus, novel strategies are needed to overcome the frequent lack of pre-existing immunity in patients with EOC. We developed and tested an autologous dendritic cell (DC)-based vaccine (DCVAC), which has recently been shown to be safe and to significantly improve progression-free survival (PFS) in two independent randomized phase II clinical trials enrolling patients with EOC (SOV01, NCT02107937; SOV02, NCT02107950). In addition, our exploratory data analyses suggest that the clinical benefits of the DCVAC were more pronounced in patients with EOC with lower-than-median TMBs and reduced CD8⁺ T cell infiltration. Thus, the DC-based vaccine stands out as a promising clinical tool to jumpstart anticancer immunity in patients with immunologically “cold” EOC. Our findings underscore the need for personalized immunotherapy and the clinical relevance of potential tumor-related biomarkers within the immunotherapy field. Additional clinical trials are needed to address these strategies as well as the potential value of the TMB and immune infiltration at baseline as biomarkers for guiding the clinical management of EOC. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Progress in Vaccination against Cancer - 2023 (PIVAC-23))

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Other

Jump to: Review

9 pages, 729 KiB

Open AccessCommentary

How Reliable Are Predictions of CD8⁺ T Cell Epitope Recognition? Lessons for Cancer

by Alexander A. Lehmann, Paul V. Lehmann and Stephen Todryk

Onco 2024, 4(2), 68-76; https://doi.org/10.3390/onco4020006 - 17 Apr 2024

Viewed by 357

Abstract

Synthetic peptides derived from antigen sequences are essential reagents for the detection of CD8⁺ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs), in assays such as ELISPOT/ImmunoSpot^®. Indeed, the combination of peptides and ImmunoSpot^® has been widely used for immune monitoring in numerous vaccine trials. Target antigens in pathogens or cancers may be large in size and multiple in number, often seemingly necessitating in silico peptide epitope predictions using algorithms and programs for certain HLA alleles to narrow down the numbers of required peptides. In this commentary, we discuss our data in the context of immune responses to viral and cancer antigens, concluding that systematic high-throughput immune monitoring of CD8⁺ T cells will provide more reliable insights on the host’s response to cancer than the reliance on select CD8⁺ T cell epitopes, no matter whether these are in silico predicted or even if they had been empirically established. We show the feasibility of large scale, high-throughput systematic CD8⁺ T cell epitope testing towards this goal. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Progress in Vaccination against Cancer - 2023 (PIVAC-23))

► Show Figures