About this Research Topic
Testicular germ cell tumors (TGCTs) are the most frequent solid neoplasm in young-adult males aged 15-34 years. While its etiology remains undetermined, some risk factors include personal/family history of TGCT and testicular dysgenesis syndrome. Its incidence continues to increase, followed by a decreasing mortality related to improvement of diagnostic methods and therapies. Although the cure rate is high, still 10-15% of patients with metastatic disease fail to respond to cisplatin-based first-line treatment and need salvage therapy. Thus, TGCTs represent an important health issue. Due to the overall excellent prognosis, research in urology has drifted away from TGCTs and modern research techniques that have led to many significant advances in other genitourinary malignancies have not been so extensively explored in TGCTs. Yet, there remain numerous challenges in TGCT patients’ care that need addressing, as the stakes are very high for these young men with decades of life left to live.
Currently, there is a lack of risk stratifying biomarkers for follow-up of stage I patients. The decision to put these young patients on active surveillance versus giving them adjuvant therapy is challenging, and is still guided by clinicopathological features that, despite being useful, have important limitations. Early detection of recurrences during follow-up by non-invasive means is also relevant, given the limited sensitivity of current imaging methods and classical serum tumor markers for this purpose. On the other hand, biomarkers that predict the emergence of cisplatin resistance would be much valued, as well as novel targeted therapies that are efficient in treating this aggressive disease phenotype for which there are no validated therapeutic alternatives. Discrimination of mature teratoma as a distinct tumor subtype with clinical implications is also of clinical relevance, namely for guiding decisions concerning salvage therapy or retroperitoneal lymph-node dissection.
The goal of this Research Topic is to provide answers to these clinical questions by use of innovative and advanced methodologies and/or pre-clinical models, validated in clinical samples (tissues and/or liquid biopsies).
This Research Topic aims to contribute to the improvement of clinical care of TGCT patients, by discovering novel diagnostic, prognostic and predictive biomarkers of the disease, as well as novel targeted treatments with less toxicity for these young patients.
Specific topics welcome to be addressed in this Research Topic include:
-Pathobiology of TGCTs (genesis and risk factors of TGCTs)
-Epidemiological trends of TGCTs
-Tumor heterogeneity in TGCTs
-Histopathological assessment of TGCTs (including molecular pathology and digital pathology contributions)
-Advances in biomarkers for TGCT patients (including tissue, non-invasive and imaging)
Please note: manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by validation (independent 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.
Currently, there is a lack of risk stratifying biomarkers for follow-up of stage I patients. The decision to put these young patients on active surveillance versus giving them adjuvant therapy is challenging, and is still guided by clinicopathological features that, despite being useful, have important limitations. Early detection of recurrences during follow-up by non-invasive means is also relevant, given the limited sensitivity of current imaging methods and classical serum tumor markers for this purpose. On the other hand, biomarkers that predict the emergence of cisplatin resistance would be much valued, as well as novel targeted therapies that are efficient in treating this aggressive disease phenotype for which there are no validated therapeutic alternatives. Discrimination of mature teratoma as a distinct tumor subtype with clinical implications is also of clinical relevance, namely for guiding decisions concerning salvage therapy or retroperitoneal lymph-node dissection.
The goal of this Research Topic is to provide answers to these clinical questions by use of innovative and advanced methodologies and/or pre-clinical models, validated in clinical samples (tissues and/or liquid biopsies).
This Research Topic aims to contribute to the improvement of clinical care of TGCT patients, by discovering novel diagnostic, prognostic and predictive biomarkers of the disease, as well as novel targeted treatments with less toxicity for these young patients.
Specific topics welcome to be addressed in this Research Topic include:
-Pathobiology of TGCTs (genesis and risk factors of TGCTs)
-Epidemiological trends of TGCTs
-Tumor heterogeneity in TGCTs
-Histopathological assessment of TGCTs (including molecular pathology and digital pathology contributions)
-Advances in biomarkers for TGCT patients (including tissue, non-invasive and imaging)
Please note: manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by validation (independent 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.
Keywords: testicular germ cell tumors, biomarkers, heterogeneity, epigenetics, oncology, imaging
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
