Immunotherapy of Solid Tumors: Progress, Challenges, and Future Roadmap

Dear Colleagues,

Solid tumors are highly refractory to conventional therapeutic regimens, and a better clinical outcome still warrants early diagnosis and novel intervention approaches for long-lasting therapeutic response. In the last two decades, immunotherapy has demonstrated considerable success in cases of melanoma and lung cancer. In contrast, solid tumors such as pancreatic and brain tumors are poorly responsive to immunotherapy. Immunotherapy can either work by restimulating the patient’s immune system to recognize and attack the cancer-associated self-antigens or by passively transferring immune molecules or cells that can directly destroy cancer cells. However, the compromised immune surveillance and effector mechanisms allow malignant cells to proliferate and metastasize in cancer patients. Cancer cells themselves escape the host immune system by adopting different strategies, such as MHC downregulation and antigen presentation, activation of immune checkpoint pathways, and cytokine deregulation. In addition, crosstalk between suppressive immune cells and other stromal cells of the tumor microenvironment (TME) helps cancer cells to acquire resistance to immunotherapy. Therefore, it is essential to understand the physical, biochemical, and immunological challenges associated with solid malignancies to evaluate immunotherapy-based treatment approaches more critically and conclusively. This Special Issue aims to focus on understanding the ongoing challenges in optimizing immunotherapies for solid malignancies and highlighting endeavors to overcome such roadblocks. Studies in this issue will provide a future roadmap to optimize and evaluate immunotherapies to treat solid malignancies.

We look forward to your contributions.

Dr. Shailendra Gautam
Dr. Abhijit Aithal
Guest Editors

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