Novel Advances in Gastrointestinal Cancer Treatment

There are exciting times ahead for exploring the biological mechanisms of gastrointestinal cancer and discovering new drugs for therapy, but there are also unsatisfied needs that aim at both understanding specifically gastrointestinal cancer and discovering novel drug targets for drug development in this type of cancer. Over the past years, tremendous advances and successes have been made in progressive principle and technique for current gastrointestinal cancer therapy, including anti-PD-1/PD-L inhibitors, antibody drug conjugates (ADC) and aptamers, as well as more recent chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CART) therapy, PROTAC, RNA therapy (siRNA and mRNA therapy), gene therapy and their combination in gastrointestinal cancer patients.

However, there are still many challengers in gastrointestinal cancer cures for most patients because of individual differences, drug resistance and reoccurrence. Identification of the mechanisms and therapeutic targets involved in gastrointestinal cancer has proven to be a promising field, which would be helpful not only for the prevention, but also to improve the understanding and characterization of gastrointestinal cancer, and to optimize and personalize the treatment. Multidisciplinary research has been performed to explore new opportunities in treatment that may increase the overall survival of patients, however, the side effects such as cytotoxicity and development of drug resistance remain and have limited the clinical practice. The specific mechanisms of gastrointestinal cancer and promising drug targets need to be further identified, which will provide more reliable data for precise treatment and improve the clinical outcomes of cancer.

The purpose of this Research Topic is to collect novel scientific findings and strategies in gastrointestinal cancer biological mechanisms and drug discovery, to improve future treatments. We welcome both original research and review articles that focus on but not limited to the following topics:

• Novel mechanisms for gastrointestinal cancer initiation and progression

• Novel mechanisms of action underlying anti-cancer agents in gastrointestinal cancer treatment

• Novel mechanisms of immunotherapy in gastrointestinal cancer

• Molecular mechanism of drug resistance to gastrointestinal cancer, and strategies to overcome the resistance.

• Multi-omics to insight the intrinsic and extrinsic mechanism of precision medicine to gastrointestinal cancer

• Single-cell RNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics research in gastrointestinal cancer