Immunotherapy has played an increasingly important role in the therapy of cancer in the past 20 years, and notably the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 was awarded jointly to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for “their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.” Meanwhile, many medicines have been approved by the FDA since 2010, such as Sipuleucel-T targeting a specific cancer antigen and Ipilimumab for unresectable or metastatic melanoma.

However, with the increasing number of researches and usage of immunotherapy, problems of drug resistance occurred. Resistance to the immunotherapy impedes the uptake of these new technologies, and thus it is in great need to be solved. Methods like combination therapy, adaptive containment strategies, and computational modeling of tumors have been developed but are still under the process of exploration and, thus, more mechanisms need to be explored.

We would like to invite you to submit an article with the theme of Resistance to Immunotherapy: A Challenge of Cancer Treatment. Subthemes include the target sites of relative drugs, pathways and associated mechanisms of regulation, mutation site research in predicting drug resistance, and combination therapy to solve the potential resistance. Article types welcomed are reviews and experimental and clinical research articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Acquired resistance in cancer immunotherapy
• Immunotherapy resistance and combination therapy
• Signaling pathways in the resistance of cancer immunotherapy
• Effect of noncoding RNAs in cancer immunotherapy resistance
• Signaling pathways activating PD-1 resistance in cancer immunotherapy
• Role of genomics markers in predicting the cancer treatment resistance
• Mechanisms of resistance to immune checkpoint blockades
• Tumor microenvironment and resistance to immunotherapy
• Role of cancer stem cells in resistance to immunotherapy
• Strategies of cancer immunotherapy resistance
• Mechanisms of resistance to cancer immunity vaccines