For half a century, cancer physicians have mainly relied on three primary treatment modalities: surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. Over that time, enormous progress has been made in understanding cancer biology. Targeted anti-cancer drugs have emerged, and thousands of clinical trials have taught us how to best craft treatment combinations that improve clinical outcomes.

However, each case of cancer exhibits a unique pathological signature and can be highly heterogeneous in response to the targeted therapeutic agents. Therefore, precise therapy is essential to improve cancer treatment. The development of personalized and rationalized therapy relies on the identification of the specific biomarkers, the validation of therapeutic targets, and the development of drugs against the validated targets. Nucleotide and Nucleic acid-associated biomarkers cover nucleotides, circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA), circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), mRNA, microRNAs (miRNAs), circular RNA (circRNA), exosomal RNAs (exRNAs), and long non-coding RNAs (IncRNAs) in tumor cells and serum. They are playing vital roles as diagnostic or therapeutic agents for cancer theranostics and can be used for cancer risk assessment, diagnosis, prognosis, and for the prediction of treatment efficacy and recurrence. In addition, the sensitive biomarkers can be also used as therapeutic targets for various tumors. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify novel biomarkers and explore the biological functions of these biomarkers in order to greatly improve the clinical targeted therapies and immunotherapies of cancers.

This Special Issue aims to focus on the advances in the discoveries of nucleotide and nucleic acid-associated cancer biomarkers that inform treatment outcomes, including technologies and experimental approaches, as well as clinical validations and applications. We welcome the submission of original research and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• New technologies or methods employed in characterizing molecular features of nucleotide and nucleic acid-associated biomarkers
• cfDNA or ctDNA as biomarkers for cancer theranostics
• circRNA, lncRNA, miRNA, or exRNAs as biomarkers for cancer theranostics
• Regulatory roles of IncRNAs in tumorigenesis
• The molecular mechanisms involved in the dysregualtion of nucleotide and nucleic acid-associated biomarkers in normal and pathological conditions
• Nucleic acid-related biomarkers to predict the chemotherapy or immunotherapy response in cancer patients
• Nucleotide regulation and metabolism in cancers
• Other new emerging areas involving in nucleotide and nucleic acid-associated biomarkers, such as cross-analysis of biomarkers with nanomedicine, molecular imaging, omics data, etc.