Circulating Tumor Cells: Origin, Fate, and Roles in Immune Evasion and Metastasis
A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Tumor Microenvironment".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2024 | Viewed by 305
Special Issue Editors
Interests: p53 misfolding and aggregation in cancer initiation and progression; breast cancer; ovarian cancer; unfolded protein response; polyploid giant cancer cells
2. Cancer Biology Program, Mitchell Cancer Institute, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL 36604, USA
Interests: pancreatic cancer; prostate cancer; breast cancer; carcinogenesis; tumor microenvironment; metastasis; therapy resistance; gene regulation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
More than a century and a half ago, Thomas R. Ashworth, at that time a Resident Physician at Melbourne Hospital, made a seminal discovery when he noted the presence of cells morphologically similar to those in the tumors in the blood of a patient who had died of cancer. He published his findings in the Australian Medical Journal publication in 1869, which is considered the first report of what is now termed circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Since then, much effort has been devoted to determining the why and how of the presence of this subset of tumor cells in the blood, and more importantly, the consequences of such presence for the outcome of cancer patients and the opportunities these cells offer for early diagnosis and anti-cancer therapies. The past two decades have witnessed immense progress in the CTCs research, especially in the following areas: 1) The tumor microenvironment factors that drive the dissemination of tumor cells into the circulation; 2) The interaction of CTCs with circulating immunocompetent cells and their evasion of immunosurveillance; 3) The role of CTCs in the resistance to antitumor therapy and facilitation of metastases; and 4) The potential utility of CTCs as tumor markers and therapeutic targets. CTCs account for a minor fraction of the circulating cells in the blood of cancer patients making their accurate detection a challenging task. However, the advent of novel methods for isolating of CTCs and their characterization at the single-cell level in recent years have significantly advanced the understanding of their biology and clinical relevance. Consequently, CTCs have become a topic of interest for a broad spectrum of professionals, from oncologists and pathologists to researchers dedicated to basic, clinical, and translational studies.
Therefore, this Special Issue of Cancers invites research articles and timely reviews on all aspects of the biology of CTCs, their roles in cancer progression and metastasis, and the advances in immunotherapy targeting CTCs.
Dr. Luis Del Pozo-Yauner
Prof. Dr. Ajay Pratap Singh
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. Cancers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2900 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
- circulating tumor cells
- cancer immunotherapy
- PD-1/PD-L1
- unfolded protein response
- cell stress
- carcinogenesis
- polyploid giant cancer cells
- biomarkers
- early diagnosis
- prognosis
- monitoring of therapeutic response
