About this Research Topic

Background

Drug resistance is the main obstacle to the successful treatment of cancer patients. Drug resistance could be developed in an innate or acquired manner and through multiple mechanisms, including drug target alteration, drug inactivation, efflux increase, compensatory signaling enhancement, cell death inhibition, etc. The tumor immuno-microenvironment and systematic immunity strongly impact the efficacy of anti-cancer drugs. Shared therapy resistance signaling is mediated by multiple mechanisms, such as engagement of integrins and other context receptors, cell-cell communication, stress responses, and metabolic reprogramming, which cooperate with effects elicited by autocrine and paracrine chemokine and growth factor cues present in the activated tumor microenvironment.

During anti-cancer drug treatment, the tumor-local and systematic immunity may directly or indirectly affect the transcriptional, epigenetic, metabolic regulation, cell fate, and plasticity recasting of cancer cells, modulates the constitution and feature of the tumor microenvironment, interacts with the anti-cancer drug, and leads to strengthened or weakened efficacy of the cancer therapy. Hence, it’s of great importance and interest to study the detailed function and mechanisms of immunity in the development of anti-cancer drug resistance. Besides, cancer immunotherapy and its resistance also draw extensive attention and deserve in-depth research.

This Research Topic aims to provide and share novel findings and thoughts in regard to the roles and mechanisms of immunity in the development of anti-cancer drug resistance. We welcome Original Research, Review, and Perspective articles focusing on, but not limited to the following aspects:
1. Novel models and technologies facilitating the research of immunity in cancer drug resistance.
2. Novel immune targets and strategies for overcoming anti-cancer drug resistance.
3. Novel biological mechanisms of anti-cancer drug sensitivity/resistance resulted from tumor-local and/or systematic immunity.
4. Inflammation, certain types of immune cells and/or factors within the microenvironment, and their roles in the development of drug resistance, the changes of tumor immune microenvironment during the development of drug resistance. Or their contributions to sensitize resistant tumors to anti-cancer drugs.
5. Detailed data mining and analysis to uncover the effect of immunity on the anti-cancer drug resistance development, or to identify candidate immune targets for cancer therapy.
6. Clinical trial, case report, new applications and development of tumor immunotherapy, and studies regarding tumor immunotherapy resistance.
7. The effect of tumor-local and/or systematic immunity on stem-like cancer cells, persistent cells, tumor plasticity on cancer cell fate change (like epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition), and cancer evolution.

Keywords: cancer therapy, drug resistance, immunity, precision oncology, tumor microenvironment

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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