This Research Topic is the third volume of the “Biomarkers in the era of cancer immunotherapy: zooming in from periphery to tumor microenvironment” Community Series. Please see Volume I here and Volume II here

Cancer immunotherapy is progressively taking its place as a standard of care in modern cancer therapy clinics. This comes as a culmination of many years of research in basic and translational cancer immunology and immunotherapy. Durable remissions remain a highly sought-after outcome. To achieve that, we would need a better understanding of both the mechanism of action of cancer immunotherapy drugs as well as their impact on the patient’s immune system and the tumor microenvironment. Intense efforts are being geared up to fill these knowledge gaps in academia and pharma. Biomarkers provide an insight into the natural as well as drug-influenced interaction between tumor cells, their microenvironment, and the immune system and can enable the identification of patients with durable clinical responses.

Provide an insight into how non-invasive imaging and peripheral blood biomarkers can help in understanding the mechanism of action and patient selection in cancer immunotherapy as compared to those from the tumor microenvironment, which remains an underexploited source of biomarkers. Here, we will explore how we can utilize peripheral and tumor microenvironment biomarkers to move beyond target interaction to the broader set of pharmacodynamic, mechanistic, and response biomarkers. Which biomarkers would inform about whether a drug is beneficial or detrimental and where and when to sample them? This will include investigating patient stratification biomarkers, response prediction biomarkers as well as response monitoring or pharmacodynamic biomarkers.

In this Research Topic, we welcome the submissions of Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, Perspective, and Clinical Trial articles focusing on, but non-limited to, the following sub-topics:

● The immune consequence of various subtypes of cancer-associated fibroblast in the tumor microenvironment
● Interaction between immune and non-immune cell subsets in tumor microenvironment
● Response prediction biomarkers for cancer immunotherapy
● Blood- versus tissue-based biomarkers in cancer immunotherapy
● Learnings from blood and tissue biomarkers for cancer immunotherapy
● Imaging modalities for exploring tumor targeting and rejection by cancer immunotherapy
● Liquid biopsies as a response prediction and response monitoring biomarker in cancer immunotherapy
● The contribution of various T and NK cell subsets to the outcome of cancer immunotherapy
● Long-term effects of cancer immunotherapy on the immune system

Please note that Dr. Jehad Charo is an employee and stockholder at Roche. Also note that manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by validation (independent 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.

Are you interested in contributing a manuscript to this Research Topic?

Community Series in Biomarkers in the Era of Cancer Immunotherapy: Zooming in from Periphery to Tumor Microenvironment, Volume III