Immunotherapeutic Biomarkers and Selection Strategies

Immunotherapy has been one of the recent major breakthroughs in cancer therapy. The basic mechanism of immunotherapy agents is to facilitate the immune system to view cancer cells as a foreign presence. The recent success demonstrated by immune checkpoint inhibition in melanoma has launched a boom in immune checkpoint inhibitor trials in several different histologies, but these unfortunately have not shown the same outcome as melanoma. There still exists a significant gap to bridge in therapeutic improvement of these therapies, with patient selection still a major unresolved issue. Advancements in preclinical modeling and tumor and immune cell sequencing technology have had a significant impact on the types of immune-related biomarkers that can be evaluated. These advancements are both a blessing and challenge for clinicians attempting to make sense of rapidly changing landscape of immunotherapy. This is both true in community practice using immunotherapy treatment for their patients and for academic clinicians involved in designing and conducting immunotherapy clinical trials who are essential in developing correlative studies to evaluate potential biomarkers. Here in this chapter, we aim to discuss the immunotherapeutic biomarkers and the overall selection strategies.