The advent of immunotherapy has been a true revolution in the field of epithelial cancers but has yielded only tepidly encouraging results in bone and soft tissue sarcomas. In the attempt to maximize these small – yet observed – glimpses of immunotherapy activity, defining effective predictive biomarkers of immunotherapy response is of utmost importance.
The research topic would focus on issues that are relevant across bone and soft tissue sarcoma histotypes, and in a few cases, which represent transversal issues in cancer immunotherapy research. For instance, the role of PD1-PDL1 expression vs. functional engagement has been recently questioned in the context of lung cancer (PMID: 36821809), and in sarcomas, the role of PDL1 (and other immune checkpoints) expression has not been thoroughly assessed. What is more, the peripheral and intratumoral characterization of most relevant immune cell populations and their dynamic changes during immunotherapy has been only partially analyzed in different clinical trials in sarcomas, but no meta-analyses or systematic reviews have been published on this topic. Finally, tertiary lymphoid structures are emerging as a highly relevant biomarker, but many practical and scientific issues to implement their assessment in the clinic remain unsolved. Any original or review contribution on these topics would be a significant step forward to advance our knowledge on the future developments of immunotherapy in sarcomas.
In this context, current hot topics are represented by immune checkpoint expression and assessment, peripheral and intratumoral immunophenotyping, and recent advances in the understanding of tertiary lymphoid structures.
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 topic.
Topic Coordinator Alessandra Merlini received financial support from PharmaMar in the form of travel expenses. The other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.
Keywords: Immunotherapy, sarcomas, predictive biomarkers, immune checkpoints, tertiary lymphoid structures
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