Immunotherapeutic strategies are being utilized to harness the power of the immune system to recognize and destroy cancerous cells. However key challenges remain. While immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy can provide a more effective therapeutic option for many different advanced stage cancers; it is only effective in 30-40% of patients and nonspecific immunologic activation can lead to immune-related adverse events, including muscle weakness, joint pain, inflammatory arthritis, and myositis. In addition, immunotherapeutic strategies such as adoptive cell therapy and chimeric antigen receptors can be extremely expensive. Therefore it is imperative to develop tools that can be used to help stratify patients that would best benefit for specific types of immunotherapy, utilize model systems to study the tumor microenvironment in order to develop better combinatorial approaches, and support platforms that can aid in the identification of prognostic and predictive biomarkers.
