title: Novel technologies and emerging biomarkers for personalized cancer immunotherapy.
abstract: The culmination of over a century's work to understand the role of the immune system in tumor control has led to the recent advances in cancer immunotherapies that have resulted in durable clinical responses in patients with a variety of malignancies. Cancer immunotherapies are rapidly changing traditional treatment paradigms and expanding the therapeutic landscape for cancer patients. However, despite the current success of these therapies, not all patients respond to immunotherapy and even those that do often experience toxicities. Thus, there is a growing need to identify predictive and prognostic biomarkers that enhance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the complex interactions between the immune system and cancer. Therefore, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) reconvened an Immune Biomarkers Task Force to review state of the art technologies, identify current hurdlers, and make recommendations for the field. As a product of this task force, Working Group 2 (WG2), consisting of international experts from academia and industry, assembled to identify and discuss promising technologies for biomarker discovery and validation. Thus, this WG2 consensus paper will focus on the current status of emerging biomarkers for immune checkpoint blockade therapy and discuss novel technologies as well as high dimensional data analysis platforms that will be pivotal for future biomarker research. In addition, this paper will include a brief overview of the current challenges with recommendations for future biomarker discovery.
authors.affiliation: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 1275 New York Ave Box 386, New York, NY 10065 USA.
authors.forename: Jianda
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.affiliation: Genentech, Inc., 1 DNA Way South, San Francisco, CA 94080 USA.
authors.forename: Priti S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Hegde
authors.affiliation: Bristol-Myers Squibb, 3551 Lawrenceville Road, Princeton, NJ 08648 USA.
authors.forename: Raphael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Clynes
authors.affiliation: Center of Experimental Therapeutics and Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research, University Hospital of Lausanne, Rue du Bugnon 21, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland ; Department of Pathology, University of Athens Medical School, "Attikon" University Hospital, 1st Rimini St, 12462 Haidari, Greece.
authors.forename: Periklis G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Foukas
authors.affiliation: Center of Experimental Therapeutics and Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research, University Hospital of Lausanne, Rue du Bugnon 21, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Alexandre
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Harari
authors.affiliation: Epiontis GmbH, Rudower Chaussee 29, 12489 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Thomas O
authors.initials: TO
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authors.affiliation: Netherlands Cancer Institute, Postbus 90203, 1006 BE Amsterdam, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Pia
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authors.affiliation: Italian Network for Biotherapy of Tumors (NIBIT)-Laboratory, c/o Medical Oncology and Immunotherapy, University Hospital of Siena, V.le Bracci,16, Siena, 53100 Italy.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Maccalli
authors.affiliation: Stanford University Medical Center, 299 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94303 USA.
authors.forename: Holden T
authors.initials: HT
authors.lastname: Maecker
authors.affiliation: Earle A. Chiles Research Institute, Providence Cancer Center, 4805 NE Glisan Street, Portland, OR 97213 USA.
authors.forename: David B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Page
authors.affiliation: Adaptive Technologies, Inc., 1551 Eastlake Avenue East Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98102 USA.
authors.forename: Harlan
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authors.lastname: Robins
authors.affiliation: AstraZeneca, One MedImmune Way, Gaithersburg, MD 20878 USA.
authors.forename: Wenru
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: PerkinElmer, 68 Elm Street, Hopkinton, MA 01784 USA.
authors.forename: Edward C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Stack
authors.affiliation: Sidra Medical and Research Center, PO Box 26999, Doha, Qatar.
authors.forename: Ena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, 5117 Centre Ave, Suite 1.27, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA.
authors.forename: Theresa L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Whiteside
authors.affiliation: National Cancer Institute, 9609 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850 USA.
authors.forename: Yingdong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Innsbruck Medical University, Medizinische Klinik, Anichstrasse 35, Innsbruck, A-6020 Austria.
authors.forename: Heinz
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zwierzina
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, Surgery and Immunology, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, 5117 Centre Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA.
authors.forename: Lisa H
authors.initials: LH
authors.lastname: Butterfield
authors.affiliation: Earle A. Chiles Research Institute, Providence Cancer Center, 4805 NE Glisan Street, Portland, OR 97213 USA.
authors.forename: Bernard A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Fox
keywords: Bioinformatics; Biomarkers; Cancer immunotherapy; Immune checkpoint blockade; Immune monitoring; Task Force; Technology