Focus 

Immunotherapy for cancer

Immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment in the last decade. By re-awakening and enhancing the immune system to fight cancer, such strategies have achieved impressive clinical responses, however, only a fraction of patients responds to treatment. There is still an unmet clinical need to develop novel and superior immunotherapies and, not surprisingly, there is a continuous expansion of immune-oncology pipeline drugs and active clinical trials. Furthermore, significant efforts have been made to identify reliable predictive biomarkers of response and resistance to immunotherapy, including but not limited to checkpoint inhibitors.

In this collection, which is curated by the Cancer and Immunology editorial teams at Nature Communications, we showcase the latest research in the field of cancer immunotherapy published in the journal. The collection is divided into four areas: clinical and translational research, new immunotherapy strategies and combinatorial approaches, chimeric antigen receptors and immune cell engineering, nanotechnology and bio-engineering for cancer immunotherapy.

With this collection, we aim to reiterate the interest of Nature Communications in publishing high-quality clinical research in the field of cancer immunotherapy, while recognizing the value of bench-based and pre-clinical studies as a first fundamental step for the design of novel immunotherapy strategies.

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