MINI REVIEW article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1611861
This article is part of the Research TopicMonitoring the Immune/Tumor Microenvironment to Improve Cancer ImmunotherapyView all 10 articles
Tracking Cellular Therapies to Optimize Homing Against Liver Metastases
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Surgery, School of Medicine, University of California, Davis, Sacramento, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Novel cellular therapies have shown practice changing results in a range of hematologic malignancies, though success against solid tumors has been limited. Key factors limiting success of these therapies against solid tumors are homing to the site(s) of disease, engraftment, maintenance of function, and persistence. The inhospitable tumor microenvironment appears to provide barriers at every step of this process. The liver, a unique organ with diverse immunoregulatory functions, is a common site for metastatic disease from solid cancers of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Although the complex interplay between hepatocytes, circulatory and tissue resident immune cells, and the enterohepatic circulation has been investigated for some time, many unanswered questions about the immunobiology of the liver remain. More so, novel imaging techniques provide unparalleled insight into these interactions and shed light on these complex processes that can lead to an improved understanding of the tumor microenvironment in the liver and opportunities for improving homing of cellular therapy against liver tumors. In this review, we will provide a focused assessment of this burgeoning field and focus on the emerging tools for studying homing of these therapies and how they may be enhanced to better treat liver metastases.
Keywords: cancer immunotherapy, cellular therapy, immune cell tracking, Chimeric Antigen Receptor, liver metastases, Regional therapy
Received: 14 Apr 2025; Accepted: 04 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Purl, Shick, Canter and Judge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sean J Judge, Department of Surgery, School of Medicine, University of California, Davis, Sacramento, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.