Biomarkers, Functional Mechanisms, and Therapeutic Potentials in Gastrointestinal Cancers

📖 The Scoop

Significant changes in diet, environment, and population increase gastrointestinal cancer morbidity. A growing number of novel biomarkers and underlying mechanisms are being elucidated, some of which may even conflict with assumptions of past decades. Therefore, collecting recent findings on novel diagnostic/prognostic factors, biomarkers, and/or risk factors in gastrointestinal cancers is a prerequisite for a better understanding of the disease. Despite remarkable progressions in surgical treatments and chemotherapies, the prognosis of gastrointestinal cancer is far from satisfactory due to the high occurrence of drug resistance. Based on the identification of novel biomarkers as well as their underlying mechanisms, targeted drug development will provide significant complementary therapeutic effects to conventional chemoradiotherapies. High-throughput methods such as next-generation sequencing on RNA level and mass spectrometry on protein/lipid/metabolite level serve as efficient strategies for biomarker identification and drug development. This Research Topic aims at presenting recent advances on gastrointestinal cancer biomarkers and their underlying functional mechanisms, providing a better understanding of carcinogenesis, tumor progression, tumor relapse, as well as drug resistance. This will subsequently contribute to the development of novel therapeutic interventions targeting gastrointestinal cancers, thus improving patients' outcomes.

Genre: Medical / General (fancy, right?)