The Role of Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) in Cancer Immunotherapy
A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Cancer Biology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 4 August 2024 | Viewed by 1270
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
It is evident that immunotherapy, particularly anti-PD1/L1 therapy, has revolutionized cancer therapy. However, it is not yet clear why anti-PD1/L1 is effective while other checkpoint inhibitors (CPIs), such as those targeting CTLA4, IDO-1, and TIGIT may be less effective or not effective at all. Could the reason for cancer immunotherapies not being equal be that the successful ones also target cancer stem cells (CSC) rather than just modulating immune effector cells? Could this be the reason many promising cancer immunotherapies, such as cancer vaccines and IL-2 modulating agents, turn out to be rather disappointing, because they failed to consider the role of CSC in the cancer-immunity cycle?
This Special Issue aims to inspire research and provide data to elucidate a stemness origin and nature of cancer as exemplified by CSC that may enable us to improve the design of cancer immunotherapy specifically and of cancer therapy generally. It may empower us to identify patients with the right tumor phenotypes who may benefit from immunotherapy. Importantly, it may inform us regarding how and when to combine immunotherapy with other therapeutic modalities to target different tumor compartments, components, and the microenvironment, comprising both CSC and differentiated cancer cells to optimize the therapeutic benefits of immunotherapy in cancer care.
Dr. Shi-Ming Tu
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- cancer stem cells
- cancer-initiating cell
- immunotherapy
- cancer vaccines
- checkpoint inhibitors
- tumor neoantigens
- cancer immunity
- immune microenvironment
