About this Research Topic
Immuno-oncology is an emerging field that is driving a paradigm shift in cancer treatment to harness the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. Checkpoint inhibitor-based immunotherapies that target the CTLA4 or PD-1/PD-1 pathways have achieved impressive success in the treatment of different cancer types. However, the response rate to these inhibitors is low (20-30%) and a subset of patients experience notable adverse effects. Evidently, the field of immuno-oncology has important unmet diagnostic needs, including an approach to stratify the patients most likely to respond or not to immunotherapy, and an ability to precisely monitor the therapeutic responses.
Current cancer diagnostics, such as those based on tissue immunohistochemistry, have limited predictive power and precision due, in part, to the complex biology driving therapeutic responses. Human cancer tissues typically contain a diverse array of cell types with heterogeneous genomic and molecular profiles. Averaging the characteristics of all cells in a cancerous tissue no doubt obscures important variations in biomarkers among a minority of, but critical, pathogenic cell populations. High resolution, single-cell analyses are thus needed in the clinic to precisely delineate the inherent heterogeneity of both the tumor and the tumor-infiltrating immune cells underlying oncogenesis in each patient. This deep level of understanding should help us to develop clinically relevant precision diagnostics.
This Research Topic seeks to coordinate and promote state-of-the-art knowledge on single cell-based precision diagnostics in immuno-oncology. The topic will include both original articles and extensive reviews highlighting influential discoveries in single-cell based immuno-oncology biomarker research. Topics may cover but are not limited to:
• Tumor mutational burden
• Microsatellite instability
• DNA repair dysfunction
• Checkpoint activation
• Tumor immune micro-environment
• Immuno-phenotyping
• Immune repertoire
• Microbiome dysfunction
• Clonal evolution
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Dr. Tong Seng Lim is a full time employee from A. Menarini Biomarkers Singapore Pte Ltd and Dr. Paola Ricciardi-Castagnoli has professional associations with A. Menarini Biomarkers Singapore Pte Ltd and Menarini Silicon Biosystems. All other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regards to the Research Topic subject.
Keywords: Single cell, precision medicine, diagnostics, immunology, oncology
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
