Dear Colleagues,

Immunotherapy has changed the landscape of cancer treatment in the past several years. The systemic administration of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), targeting PD-1, PD-L1, or CTLA-4, is the pillar of current immunotherapy. However, it is notable that ICIs have limited efficacy as monotherapy, and their greatest potential lies in combination with other treatments that can trigger or augment anti-tumour immune responses.

Accumulating preclinical data suggest that the locoregional delivery of immunotherapy agents (e.g., TLR/STING agonists, antibodies, or viruses) can induce robust systemic antitumor immunity in various types of cancers. As strong immune responses can be elicited while minimizing systemic exposure, locoregional immunotherapy provides a safe modality for patients. However, one of the major setbacks of locoregional immunotherapy is that many cancers in the clinic are not easily accessible compared with preclinical tumour models. Therefore, its clinical utilization will inevitably require image-guidance.

In interventional oncology, image-guided locoregional therapies, such as percutaneous ablation and transarterial embolization, are commonly used to treat patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. It is possible that the interventional technologies are used for the locoregional delivery of immunotherapy agents in various types of cancers, as well as hepatocellular carcinoma, for the safe integration of immunotherapies with conventional modalities or systemic ICI therapies. The purpose of this Special Issue is to collect studies regarding locoregional immunotherapies from researchers in the field of immuno-oncology and interventional oncology in order to promote new opportunities and perspectives by bridging the gap between the fields.

Dr. Heegon Kim
Prof. Dr. Dong-Hyun Kim
Guest Editor

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• immuno-oncology
• interventional oncology
• locoregional immunotherapy
• combination immunotherapy
• image-guided therapy
• local drug delivery