The tumor microenvironment (TME) plays a critical role in tumor proliferation, progression, and therapeutic responses. TME is a complex network of cancer cells, stromal cells, and, most importantly, infiltrating immune cells. Cancer cells regulate numerous biological functions through direct or indirect interaction with TME components. Emerging evidence suggests that TME crucially influences the response to both chemotherapy and immunotherapy. As scientific research has entered the big data era with the fast development of high-throughput sequencing technologies, machine learning has been gradually widely applied to extract important knowledge from big data bioinformatics. Thus, characterizing the TME landscape in cancer and identifying different immune-related TME phenotypes using machine learning-based bioinformatics analyses, in vitro experiments, and in vivo experiments are of great interest and significance.

In this book we provide insights into liver – cancer and immunology. Experts in the field provide an overview over fundamental immunological questions in liver cancer and tumorimmunology, which form the base for immune based approaches in HCC, which gain increasing interest in the community due to first promising results obtained in early clinical trials. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third most common cause of cancer related death in the United States. Treatment options are limited. Viral hepatitis is one of the major risk factors for HCC, which represents a typical “inflammation-induced” cancer. Immune-based treatment approaches have revolutionized oncology in recent years. Various treatment strategies have received FDA approval including dendritic cell vaccination, for prostate cancer as well as immune checkpoint inhibition targeting the CTLA4 or the PD1/PDL1 axis in melanoma, lung, and kidney cancer. Additionally, cell based therapies (adoptive T cell therapy, CAR T cells and TCR transduced T cells) have demonstrated significant efficacy in patients with B cell malignancies and melanoma. Immune checkpoint inhibitors in particular have generated enormous excitement across the entire field of oncology, providing a significant benefit to a minority of patients.

The tumor microenvironment (TME) plays a critical role in tumor proliferation, progression, and therapeutic responses. TME is a complex network of cancer cells, stromal cells, and, most importantly, infiltrating immune cells. Cancer cells regulate numerous biological functions through direct or indirect interaction with TME components. Emerging evidence suggests that TME crucially influences the response to both chemotherapy and immunotherapy. As scientific research has entered the big data era with the fast development of high-throughput sequencing technologies, machine learning has been gradually widely applied to extract important knowledge from big data bioinformatics. Thus, characterizing the TME landscape in cancer and identifying different immune-related TME phenotypes using machine learning-based bioinformatics analyses, in vitro experiments, and in vivo experiments are of great interest and significance.

This collection of 25 research papers comprised of 22 original articles and 3 reviews is brought together from international leaders in bioinformatics and biostatistics. The collection highlights recent computational advances that improve the ability to analyze highly complex data sets to identify factors critical to cancer biology. Novel deep learning algorithms represent an emerging and highly valuable approach for collecting, characterizing and predicting clinical outcomes data. The collection highlights several of these approaches that are likely to become the foundation of research and clinical practice in the future. In fact, many of these technologies reveal new insights about basic cancer mechanisms by integrating data sets and structures that were previously immiscible. Accordingly, the series presented here bring forward a wide range of artificial intelligence approaches and statistical methods that can be applied to imaging and genomics data sets to identify previously unrecognized features that are critical for cancer. Our hope is that these articles will serve as a foundation for future research as the field of cancer biology transitions to integrating electronic health record, imaging, genomics and other complex datasets in order to develop new strategies that improve the overall health of individual patients.

“The editors...have done an outstanding job of presenting...complex information in a lucid manner – this book is a must-read for the global community of aspiring students and neuro-oncology practitioners.” Amar Gajjar, MD in the Foreword This is a succinct introduction to pediatric neuro-oncology. It summarizes the key advances in molecular biology that have helped transform this rapidly evolving field and provides up-to-date coverage of major and emerging treatment modalities as well as supportive care. Separate chapters present each kind of pediatric brain cancer and its diagnosis and treatment. As more children survive brain cancer, the importance of quality of life issues and helping survivors to cope with the neuropsychological impact and long-term effects of current therapies has come into sharper focus; these topics are also addressed in the book, as are palliative care and pediatric neuro-oncology in countries with limited resources. The book is aimed at trainees and practitioners who seek an up-to-date text in pediatric neuro-oncology that is both comprehensive and concise.