Cardio-oncology is a new and growing interdisciplinary field dedicated to the coordination and improvement of care of cancer patients and survivors by cardiologists, oncologists, and primary care providers. The field has quickly evolved due to the increasing understanding in the clinical and research communities that cancer treatments, although potentially life-saving, may also cause serious cardiac adverse effects, known as cardiotoxicities. These potentially dangerous, unintended effects, in turn, represent a major cause of morbidity and death in cancer survivors without effective therapeutic strategies to date. Virtually all antineoplastic agents are associated with cardiotoxicity, which can be divided into 5 categories: direct cytotoxic effects of chemotherapy and associated cardiac systolic dysfunction, cardiac ischemia, arrhythmias, pericarditis, and chemotherapy-induced repolarization abnormalities.

Research in antineoplastic agents-induced cardiotoxicity includes the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of these complications in cancer patients. It also aims at elucidating the mechanisms involved in cardiotoxicity and cardio-protection, leading to the identification of novel targets for drug discovery. Over the past few decades, cardio-oncology has shed light on the mechanisms by which widely used anti-cancer drugs, such as anthracyclines and anti-HER2 monoclonal antibodies, cause heart failure (HF), and on the potential cardioprotective effects of molecules such as dexrazoxane. Nevertheless, the molecular events behind the cardiotoxicity of the next generation of oncological treatments, like immune checkpoint inhibitors, are not completely understood, and new anti-cancer therapies are continuously marketed. These limitations in our knowledge prevent from us finding specific and effective strategies to diagnose, prevent and treat HF secondary to cancer therapy-related cardiotoxicity.

This Special Issue encourages submissions related to the pathophysiology, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment (both western medicine and natural products) of the cardiotoxic effects of cancer therapies, from basic mechanistic studies to translational, preclinical, and clinical research, including clinical trials, outcomes studies, case reports, and imaging techniques. We welcome original research and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Biomarkers and the susceptibility of cancer patients to cardiovascular injury
• Identification of shared mechanisms as well as common risk factors of cancer and HF
• Understanding the role of intercellular cross-talks in the development of cardiotoxicity
• Development of powerful in vitro and in vivo models for the study of the interaction between cancer and HF as well as cardiotoxicity of oncological treatments
• Robust preclinical models to determine cardiovascular toxicity (shortcomings of current preclinical testing and correlation of the preclinical models with the clinic output)
• Cardioprotective signaling
• Mechanisms of the cardiotoxicity of anticancer drugs (e.g. epigenetic alterations, genomic instability, loss of proteostasis, mitochondrial functions, metabolic alterations)
• Prevention and treatment strategies (e.g. dose changes for chemotherapy)
• Cardioprotective drug discovery (e.g. development of new leads based on phenotypic screening or targeting a defined molecular target, drug repositioning)
• Studies and reviews on the use of large genomic, proteomic and metabolomic databases (“big data in cardio-oncology”)