Topic: Biomarker Discovery and Precision Medicine

With advances of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, blooming data have been available for exploring molecular alternations in cancers. Many of these molecular alternations have been investigated as biomarkers for cancer diagnosis, prognosis and precision therapies. Indeed, the success of most targeted anticancer therapies, such as inhibitors for EGFR, ALK, BRAF, and PARP as cancer therapies relies on biomarker-directed precision therapy. This Special Issue contains several articles in the areas of discovery of biomarkers, precision medicine and immune oncology. It is now clear that cancers with the same origins, clinical stages, and histopathologic diagnoses can be highly heterogeneous in responses to targeted therapeutic agents and immune checkpoint therapies. Various clinical trials have been shown that only a subgroup of patients benefit from pathway-targeted therapy and immune checkpoint therapies. The inability to identify patients likely to respond to a treatment is one of the major challenges in the early stages of clinical trials of anticancer agents and in clinical practice with some approved anticancer agents. Thus, identification of biomarkers capable of predicting treatment responses is crucial for targeted therapies and immunotherapies of cancers. The articles in this Special Issues discuss and/or report recent advances in discoveries of biomarkers, precision medicine and immune oncology, including strategies, experimental approaches, technologies, and clinical validations and applications. I hope this issue will provide our readers with helpful information about recent advances and achievements in this evolving field.

Target therapies, pathway targeted therapies, small molecular inhibitors, biomarkers, gene mutations, epigenetics, molecular signatures, clinical trials, metastasis, cancer stem cells, combinational therapy, precision therapies

30 Jun 2019