Immunotherapy Microfluidics Platforms
A special issue of Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X). This special issue belongs to the section "B：Biology and Biomedicine".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 121
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Ever since the discovery in 1789 and subsequent successful use of inoculation with cowpox to protect against smallpox infections, the idea of using of our natural immune system to fight against a broad range of diseases has been deemed as the most effective therapeutic approach, including the fight against cancer. However, significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of immune responses and cancer progressions have happened only in the most recent 50 years. The discovery of dendritic cells as the initiators of the immune response was in 1973 by Steinman and Cohn, a full 184 years after the inception of vaccination. Our deeper understanding of cancer at the biomolecular level, particularly the existence of tumor-associated antigens in humans, was reported in the early 1990s. In retrospect, it could be argued that the slow progress in immunotherapy has mainly been due to the lack of sophisticated tools to probe at both immune and cancer cells at molecular and cellular levels. With the advent of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technologies and, later, microfluidic platforms over the past 30 years, the flood gates to new knowledge and new discoveries in the microworld have gradually opened. This Special Issue is devoted to the latest advances in applying MEMS and microfluidics to studies in a broad range of research related to immunotherapy in the fight against cancer. Novel platform technologies in isolating immune mechanisms, the identification of the details in cancer progressions, the interactions of nanoparticles with immune responses, the faithful replications of the 3D microenvironments for both cancer and immune cells, the controlled experiment on the optimization of therapeutic approaches, and other related topics are the key targets of this Special Issue.
Prof. Dr. William C. Tang
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- immunotherapy
- MEMS
- microfluidics
- nanoparticles
- cancer
