Emerging Engineering Approaches in Cancer Immunotherapy

Cancer Immunotherapy has great potential to treat cancer and prevent its relapse by activating the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells. The initial excitement on cancer immunotherapy, however, has been dampened by its therapeutic resistance and adverse effects such as autoimmunity. Underlying these challenges are needs for engineering approaches, including methods to characterize the cancer-immune microenvironments, predictive tools to screen potential therapies rapidly and thoroughly in patient-specific ways, and delivery approaches to target immunotherapeutic agents to tumor sites. The newly emerging fields of multi-omics, nanotechnology, molecular and cell engineering are addressing some of these challenges, and there is ample opportunity for engineers to contribute their approaches and tools to further facilitate the clinical translation of cancer immunotherapy. Here we present recent technological advances in the diagnosis, therapy, and monitoring of cancer in the context of immunotherapy, as well as the ongoing challenges.

For this Research Topic, we would like to bring together recent advances in engineering approaches that enable effective and safe cancer immunotherapy, with the goal to further facilitate its clinical translation.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following aspects:
● Mechanisms and barriers for cancer immunotherapy
● Nanotechnology for enabling cancer immunotherapy
● Engineering approaches for cell-based immunotherapy
● Protein engineering for enabling cancer immunotherapy
● Engineering approaches for cancer vaccination


Please note: manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by validation (clinical cohort or biological validation in vitro or in vivo) are out of scope for this section and will not be accepted as part of this Research Topic.