Translational Research on Gastrointestinal Cancer in the Era of Precision Medicine

Dear Colleagues,

In the era of Precision Medicine in which each patient has to be the very center of health with their unique characteristics, the main aim of research is to translate the acquired laboratory data into an individualized treatment tool for improving patient stratification and selecting novel treatment strategies.

In this Special Issue, we would like to focus on tumors of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract that still represent one of the most common causes of cancer-related death worldwide, despite the significant improvements in the prognosis of patients that have been reached thanks to the development of new tailored therapies, including cytotoxic drugs, targeted therapies, and immunotherapy.

GI cancers are characterized by a high interpatient and intratumor heterogeneity, so that patients with similar phenotypes can respond differently to therapy. Understanding how tissue heterogeneity and the interaction between tumor cells and the tumor microenvironment (TME) influences treatment resistance, disease progression, and cancer relapse is a key for personalized medicine in GI tumors. 

There is an urgent need to find molecular and cellular predictive and prognostic biomarkers which can be integrated with clinical pathological and imaging data to improve the prediction of both cancer progression and response to therapy for the right patient at the right time.

In this context, not only tissue analysis but also the use of liquid biopsies can be of paramount importance to dynamic monitoring of the spatial and temporal clonal evolution of the tumor, in particular for patients for whom no tumor tissue is available.

In this Special Issue, we welcome original research and review articles focused on, but not limited to, analyses of genetic and epigenetic alterations, as well as evaluations at the transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic level in tissue and/or liquid biopsy from patients affected by GI cancers.

Dr. Chiara Molinari
Dr. Laurent Corcos
Guest Editors

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• gastrointestinal cancer
• response to therapy
• predictive biomarkers
• prognostic biomarkers
• heterogeneity
• tumoral tissue
• liquid biopsy
• tumor microenvironment