Translational Phenomics and its Applications in Immunotherapy

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Background

Immunotherapy affords a promising treatment option for multiple disease types including cancer, immune-mediated inflammatory disease (IMIDs), as well as infection. By mobilizing the intrinsic potential or engineering the complex immunological machinery, it targets aberrant disease-perturbed networks which have evaded surveillance and compromised the host immune system. Successful implementations of immunotherapy in clinical setting entail identifying the right immune target, selecting the right patient population, closely monitoring host immune responses, while in the meantime mitigating adverse effect. Comprehensive deep phenotyping of the patient immune system and diseased tissues with its content immune cells, molecular and cellular microenvironment in the context of disease onset, progression, and treatment processes is imperative for better understanding of disease pathogenesis and for identifying key molecular biomarkers leading to effective therapeutics and clinical outcome.

The goal of this research topic is to cover research that employs systems thinking, phenomics strategy and multi-omics technologies to address imminent challenges in immunotherapy. We use the term phenomics to broadly refer to all micro- and macro-phenotypic manifestations that go beyond ones genome, including but not limited to transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic, metabolomic, microbiomic, clincial biochemistry, and cellular phenotypes, measured in a given individual. In particular, we would like to see studies that improve current treatment regime, expand clinical indications, offer novel therapeutic targets, provide biomarkers for patient stratification, develop innovative clinical testing, and dissect molecular mechanism of immune cell function in both health and disease, as pertinent to the applications in immunotherapy.

The scope and themes covered will include, but not limited to:

1. Expertised views on phenomics, immunology and human diseases: advance, technologies, challenges and future;
2. Genetic association studies linking phenotypes and genetic variants in immune response, IMIDs or immuno-oncology;
3. Utilising phenomics to develop translational biomarkers that can be measured in a clinical cohort to quantitatively assess diagnostic and therapeutic benefits in the context of IMIDs and Immuno-oncology;
4. Longitudinal or case-control phenomic studies to advance our knowledge in disease pathogenesis and therapy;
5. Functional studies of outcomes from phenomics study that leads to the knowledge discovery involving immune response, IMIDs or Immuno-oncology;
6. The development of the state-of-the-art approaches, open-source tools, standardization protocols, and open-access databases supporting phenomics;
7. Utilization of phenomics approaches in developing new drugs that enhance immunotherapy.

We welcome the submission of Original Research, Reviews, Mini-reviews and Perspective articles.

Keywords: translational phenomics, cancer, immunotherapy

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.

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