Understanding Regulation of T cell’s Cytotoxic Function to Optimize Immunotherapy for Cancer Patients

Cancer is the leading cause of disease-related death globally. Although immunotherapy has brought great benefits to cancer patients, there’re still some problems to be addressed, such as screening benefited populations and overcoming primary/acquired immunotherapy resistance. T cell is the major effector in anti-tumor immunity, especially for CD8+ T cells. The anti-tumor efficacy of immunotherapy is dependent on T cell’s cytotoxic function. There’re various factors participating in the regulation of T cell’s cytotoxic function, such as cell-cell interaction, including T cell-T cell (CD8+ T cell-Th17 and CD8+ T cell-Treg and etc.), T cell-stromal cell, and T cell-tumor cell interactions. The interaction between them can produce inflammation cytokines, alter the T cell lineage landscape, and induce T cell’s cytotoxic function exhaustion, finally causing immune escape and resistance to immunotherapy. Therefore, understanding the mechanism involved in regulating T cell’s cytotoxic function will be an important strategy for better conducting cancer immunotherapy.
T cell’s cytotoxic functions will be individually altered during cancer immunotherapy, and we are still less cognitive about how different functional T cells will be appropriately induced to differentiate and be activated/exhausted to influence T cell’s cytotoxic effect and immunotherapy sensitivity in cancer patients. This Research Topic seeks more mechanisms for activation/exhaustion of T cell’s cytotoxic effect during immunotherapy in cancer patients, aiming to identify novel drug targets and dynamically monitor immunotherapy efficacy for cancer patients.
In this Research Topic, we welcome Original Research, Review, Mini Review, and Opinion articles, exploring the mechanisms related to T cell’s anti-tumor cytotoxic effect and its involvement in cancer immunotherapy. Multi-dimension analysis, such as the combination of next-generation sequencing, scRNA-seq, and experimental research are encouraged.
More specifically, topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Identification of new T cell subtypes and their effect on T cell’s anti-tumor cytotoxic function during cancer immunotherapy.
• Dynamic monitoring technology of T cell’s cytotoxic function during cancer immunotherapy.
• The difference in T cell’s function between cancer patients with different molecular typing, such as driver gene mutations.
• Utilization of T cell cytotoxic markers to identify immunotherapy-benefited patients.
• Other mechanisms affecting T cell’s cytotoxic function, including cytokines, T cell receptor repertoire, antigen presentation, processing, etc.
Please note: Manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by robust and relevant validation (clinical cohort or biological validation in vitro or in vivo) are out of scope for this section and will not be accepted as part of this Research Topic.