Screening Cancer Immunotherapy: When Engineering Approaches Meet Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Immunotherapy is a class of promising anticancer treatments that has recently gained attention due to surging numbers of FDA approvals and extensive preclinical studies demonstrating efficacy. Nevertheless, further clinical implementation has been limited by high variability in patient response to different immunotherapeutic agents. These treatments currently do not have reliable predictors of efficacy and may lead to side effects. The future development of additional immunotherapy options and the prediction of patient-specific response to treatment require advanced screening platforms associated with accurate and rapid data interpretation. Advanced engineering approaches ranging from sequencing and gene editing, to tumor organoids engineering, bioprinted tissues, and organs-on-a-chip systems facilitate the screening of cancer immunotherapies by recreating the intrinsic and extrinsic features of a tumor and its microenvironment. High-throughput platform development and progress in artificial intelligence can also improve the efficiency and accuracy of screening methods. Here, these engineering approaches in screening cancer immunotherapies are highlighted, and a discussion of the future perspectives and challenges associated with these emerging fields to further advance the clinical use of state-of-the-art cancer immunotherapies are provided.

Tailoring Materials for Modulation of Macrophage Fate

“…The promising applications include cancer nanomedicine and immunotherapy. [377,378] Biomaterial-mediated immunotherapy has been rapidly advancing and can efficiently synergize traditional therapies. Materials science holds vast promise to break through some bottlenecks and challenges in the field of immunology and immunotherapy.…”

Microfluidic Organoids-on-a-Chip: Quantum Leap in Cancer Research

“…By combining these advanced engineering approaches, which range from gene sequencing to tumor organoid engineering with organs-on-a-chip technology, could allow the screening of cancer immunotherapies by recreating the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of a TME. Immunotherapy’s efficacy could depend on patient-specific mutations and the expression of specific biomarkers within the immune microenvironment, making predictive screening of immunotherapy options crucial at a single patient’s level [ 226 ]. Thus, Aung et al developed a perfusable multicellular breast cancer tumor-on-a-chip platform utilizing different cell populations such as cancer cells, monocytes, and endothelial cells within a gelatin hydrogel.…”

Tackling Current Biomedical Challenges With Frontier Biofabrication and Organ-On-A-Chip Technologies

“…Performing data analytics of such voluminous data sets is generally complex, and new in silico tools should be specifically developed in collaboration with mathematicians, statisticians, and bioinformaticians. Big data analysis, deep learning, and artificial intelligence methods have already been effectively applied and implemented in many industrial and research fields and technologies, and it is reasonable to foresee that soon they might also be integrated with the most advanced biotech systems for organ/tissue modeling ( Galan et al, 2020 ; Xu and Ye, 2020 ; Zhou et al, 2020 ). Of note, generating these datasets, at least in the near future, is expected to be time-consuming and costly and, therefore, impractical at the single laboratory or small start-up levels.…”