Recent Advances in Immunotherapy for Breast Cancer

Dear Colleagues,

Breast cancer is currently the most common cancer globally, accounting for 12.5% of all new annual cancer cases worldwide. Breast cancer is the second most common cause of death from cancer in women in the United States. It is estimated that 43,700 people (43,170 women and 530 men) deaths from this disease will occur in the United States in 2023.

Recent progress in immunotherapy has led to major breakthroughs, including FDA-approved immune checkpoint inhibitors, in the treatment of triple negative breast cancer in both metastatic and early stage setting. Despite the improvement, currently immune checkpoint inhibitor use is limited to a small fraction of breast cancer patients and most breast cancers are considered immune-cold. Many ongoing trials are investigating the combination of immunotherapies involving immune checkpoint inhibitors with conventional chemotherapy, biological targeted therapies, antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) as well as with other immunotherapeutic strategies such as radiation therapy, cancer vaccines, NK cells, CAR-T cells, bispecific antibodies, and oncolytic viruses in all breast cancer subtypes.

This Special Issue on breast cancer immunotherapy will be dedicated to providing updated information regarding cutting-edge immunotherapeutic approaches, immunotherapies currently under clinical development and updated key results from clinical trials.

In addition, cutting-edge preclinical works, immune biomarkers in the identification of immunophenotypically features able to improve patient selection and the efficacy of the therapeutic response will be discussed.

Beyond triple negative breast cancer, immunotherapeutic approaches targeting HER2-positive breast cancer, luminal breast cancer and/or specific subtypes of breast cancer such as metaplastic breast cancer and lobular breast cancer will also be covered.

Finally, we will discuss the challenges to the successful implementation of immune treatment in managing breast cancer and their implications for the design of future clinical trials.

We warmly welcome the submission of original research papers and reviews.

Dr. Yuan Yuan
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Molecular Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. There is an Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal. For details about the APC please see here. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• breast cancer
• immunotherapy
• adoptive cell therapy
• immune biomarkers