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

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

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

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