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Medicina
Special Issues
Immuno-Oncology: Future Insights and Current Place in Cancer Treatment
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Immuno-Oncology: Future Insights and Current Place in Cancer Treatment

A special issue of Medicina (ISSN 1648-9144). This special issue belongs to the section "Hematology and Immunology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2021) | Viewed by 3854

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Vito Longo

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Guest Editor
IRCCS Istituto Tumori Giovanni Paolo II, Bari, Italy
Interests: immunotherapy; lung cancer; breast cancer; gastrointestinal cancer
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Oronzo Brunetti

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Guest Editor
Medical Oncology Unit, IRCCS Istituto Tumori “Giovanni Paolo II” of Bari, 70124 Bari, Italy
Interests: pancreatic cancer; biliary tract cancers; gastrointestinal cancers
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In this Special Issue of Medicina, titled “Immuno-Oncology: Future Insights and Current Place in Cancer Treatment”, we want to touch on several interesting aspects of research in this field. The role of the immune system in the control of the tumor growth was firstly described by William Coley in the 19th century with the use of a live bacteria as an immune stimulant to treat cancer. However, the enthusiasm for cancer immunotherapy has been moderate due to limited clinical efficacy. In the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in the use of immunotherapy for cancers. At present, several clinical trials regarding solid and hematological malignancies have pointed out the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as blocking antibodies to cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen-4 (CTLA-4) and programmed death-1 (PD-1), chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, and vaccines. Nevertheless, a lot of aspects of these new treatment approaches are still unexplored:

  • Are there predictive biomarkers?
  • Which strategies could improve cancer immune checkpoint inhibitors’ efficacy?
  • Which could be the management of immunotherapy toxicity?
  • Which correlations are present between tumor microenvironment and immunotherapy outcome?

This Issue will aim to answer to these and other questions on the cancer immunotherapy.

Dr. Vito Longo
Dr. Oronzo Brunetti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Medicina is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • immune checkpoint inhibitors
  • anti-PD1, anti-PDL1
  • anti-CTLA4
  • abscopal effect
  • CAR-T
  • tumor microenvironment
  • prognostic and predictive biomarkers

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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10 pages, 326 KiB  
Opinion
Synergies Radiotherapy-Immunotherapy in Head and Neck Cancers. A New Concept for Radiotherapy Target Volumes—“Immunological Dose Painting”
by Camil Ciprian Mireştean, Anda Crişan, Călin Buzea, Roxana Irina Iancu and DragoşPetru Teodor Iancu
Medicina 2021, 57(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/medicina57010006 - 23 Dec 2020
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 3334
Abstract
The combination of immune checkpoint inhibitors and definitive radiotherapy is investigated for the multimodal treatment of cisplatin non-eligible locally advanced head and neck cancers (HNC). In the case of recurrent and metastatic HNC, immunotherapy has shown benefit over the EXTREME protocol, being already [...] Read more.
The combination of immune checkpoint inhibitors and definitive radiotherapy is investigated for the multimodal treatment of cisplatin non-eligible locally advanced head and neck cancers (HNC). In the case of recurrent and metastatic HNC, immunotherapy has shown benefit over the EXTREME protocol, being already considered the standard treatment. One of the biggest challenges of multimodal treatment is to establish the optimal therapy sequence so that the synergistic effect is maximal. Thus, superior results were obtained for the administration of anti-CTLA4 immunotherapy followed by hypofractionated radiotherapy, but the anti-PD-L1 therapy demonstrates the maximum potential of radio-sensitization of the tumor in case of concurrent administration. The synergistic effect of radiotherapy–immunotherapy (RT–IT) has been demonstrated in clinical practice, with an overall response rate of about 18% for HNC. Given the demonstrated potential of radiotherapy to activate the immune system through already known mechanisms, it is necessary to identify biomarkers that direct the “nonresponders” of immunotherapy towards a synergistic RT–IT stimulation strategy. Stimulation of the immune system by irradiation can convert “nonresponder” to “responder”. With the development of modern techniques, re-irradiation is becoming an increasingly common option for patients who have previously been treated with higher doses of radiation. In this context, radiotherapy in combination with immunotherapy, both in the advanced local stage and in recurrent/metastatic of HNC radiotherapy, could evolve from the “first level” of knowledge (i.e., ballistic precision, dose conformity and homogeneity) to “level two” of “biological dose painting” (in which the concept of tumor heterogeneity and radio-resistance supports the need for doses escalation based on biological criteria), and finally to the “third level“ ofthe new concept of “immunological dose painting”. The peculiarity of this concept is that the radiotherapy target volumes and tumoricidal dose can be completely reevaluated, taking into account the immune-modulatory effect of irradiation. In this case, the tumor target volume can include even the tumor microenvironment or a partial volume of the primary tumor or metastasis, not all the gross and microscopic disease. Tumoricidal biologically equivalent dose (BED) may be completely different from the currently estimated values, radiotherapy treating the tumor in this case indirectly by boosting the immune response. Thus, the clinical target volume (CTV) can be replaced with a new immunological-clinical target volume (ICTV) for patients who benefit from the RT–IT association (Image 1). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Immuno-Oncology: Future Insights and Current Place in Cancer Treatment)
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