Advances in Translational Research for Soft Tissue Sarcomas

Dear Colleagues,

Soft tissue sarcomas (STSs) are rare and heterogeneous tumors of mesenchymal origin, presenting with an incidence around 50–60 new cases per year for every million people. Around 30–40% of localized STS will finally develop metastases, highlighting how the efficacy of our treatments requires improvement. The difficulty in the development of new therapeutic strategies is enhanced by the complexity and heterogeneity of STS, which are, at the moment, subclassified into more than 70 histological and molecular types with varying biology, molecular aberrations, clinical behaviours, and with a trend to a progressive addition of new subtypes as molecular and genetics data about these tumors are obtained by researchers. In localized disease, surgery remains the mainstay of treatment of STS, often combined with radiotherapy. For locally advanced or metastatic STS, the therapeutic options are limited, and clinical responses to chemotherapy are variable and usually scarce, with good responses to anticancer therapies continuing to be limited to a small subset of STS patients. In this scenario, it is urgently needed to broaden the knowledge of heterogeneous molecular patterns of STSs to understand the activable pathways that define the prognosis and underly the risk of relapse. Thus, a translational research approach, with the aim to join the efforts of clinical physicians and basic researchers, is of utmost importance to detect biomarkers that can predict drug response and to explain the differences in treatment efficacy and toxicity among patients.

This Special Issue of Cancers will focus on novel prognostic and predictive markers, as well as novel approaches in addressing and monitoring STS patients, in order to improve our understanding of these tumors and the efficacy of our therapeutical strategies.

Prof. Dr. Domenico Andrea Campanacci
Dr. Serena Pillozzi
Dr. Guido Scoccianti
Guest Editors

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• chemoresistance
• liquid biopsy
• soft tissue sarcoma
• molecular biology
• predictive and prognostic biomarker
• pharmacogenetic