Immune Ecosystem Remodeling: How Single-Cell, Spatial Omics, and AI Are Redefining Precision Immunotherapy in Cancer and Infectious Diseases
核心洞察
A new Frontiers Research Topic calls for studies integrating single-cell sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, multi-omics, and artificial intelligence to decode immune resistance and ecosystem remodeling in cancer (搜索) and viral infections (搜索).
The initiative emphasizes that existing biomarkers provide only a partial view of complex immune ecosystems and fail to capture dynamic interactions among immune cells, stromal populations, and diseased cells.
Researchers aim to identify novel biomarkers, characterize host–tumor and host–pathogen interactions, and uncover actionable therapeutic targets to improve precision immunotherapy and antiviral strategies.
Immune-mediated diseases, including cancer (搜索) and viral infections (搜索), continue to pose major global health challenges despite remarkable advances in immunology and therapeutic development. In both contexts, dynamic interactions among immune cells, tissue-resident stromal populations, and diseased cells shape immune activation, immune evasion, disease progression, and therapeutic outcomes. Now, a new Research Topic launched by Frontiers aims to harness the power of single-cell sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, multi-omics profiling, computational biology, and artificial intelligence to decode these complex immune ecosystems at unprecedented resolution.
The initiative, titled "Immune resistance and immune ecosystem remodeling in cancer (搜索) and viral infections (搜索): integrating advanced experimental models, multi-omics, spatial biology, and Artificial Intelligence," seeks to bring together multidisciplinary studies that advance understanding of why immune responses fail to effectively eliminate malignant cells or control viral infections, and why many patients develop therapeutic resistance or disease progression.
The Limitations of Current Biomarkers
According to the Research Topic editors, existing biomarkers often provide only a partial view of complex immune ecosystems and are insufficient to capture the dynamic interactions among immune cells, tissue-resident stromal populations, malignant cells, or infected host cells. This gap has motivated a concerted push toward integrative experimental and computational approaches that can reveal the full complexity of immune resistance mechanisms.
The collection particularly encourages contributions leveraging organoid models, single-cell and spatial omics, multi-omics integration, systems immunology, computational modeling, artificial intelligence, digital pathology, and innovative bioinformatics. The ultimate goal is to identify novel biomarkers, characterize host–tumor and host–pathogen interactions, and uncover actionable therapeutic targets.
Bridging Cancer (搜索) and Infectious Disease Immunology
The Research Topic spans both oncology and infectious disease domains, welcoming original research articles, reviews, perspectives, and methodological studies. Key themes include immune checkpoint resistance and tumor microenvironment dynamics, single-cell and spatial omics with multi-omics integration, digital pathology and machine learning, biomarker discovery, immune cell heterogeneity, stromal–immune interactions, immune metabolism, host–pathogen interactions, and organoid and organ-on-a-chip models.
Studies integrating experimental findings with computational analyses are particularly encouraged, as are purely computational investigations based on publicly available datasets, provided they offer novel biological insights or methodological advances.
A Parallel Focus on Infectious Diseases
A companion Research Topic, "Immune Cell Remodeling and Reprogramming in Infectious Diseases: Single-Cell and Spatial Insights toward Precision Therapeutics," further underscores the growing emphasis on host-side immune dynamics. This initiative highlights that immune cell populations undergo continuous remodeling and reprogramming during infection—processes that determine pathogen clearance, disease persistence, immune-mediated pathology, and therapeutic response.
The editors note that while traditional studies have often centered on pathogen-driven mechanisms, the focus is now shifting to host-side dynamics that dictate infection progression and recovery. With single-cell and spatial omics technologies, researchers are beginning to uncover the hidden diversity and complex interactions of immune cells across infectious contexts such as HIV (搜索), tuberculosis (搜索), chronic viral hepatitis, COVID-19 (搜索), and antimicrobial-resistant infections.
Toward Host-Directed Therapeutics
The infectious disease Research Topic specifically delimits its scope to investigations focusing on host immune cell remodeling and its decoding through single-cell, spatial, and multi-omics technologies. Themes of interest include monocyte–macrophage plasticity, T-cell exhaustion, B-cell and NK-cell dysfunction, dendritic-cell reprogramming, neutrophil heterogeneity, trained immunity, and metabolic or epigenetic adaptation.
Both Research Topics share a common translational ambition: to bridge basic immunology with clinical research and accelerate the development of more precise, mechanistically informed, and clinically translatable immunotherapies and antiviral strategies. By fostering collaboration across immunology, oncology, infectious diseases, computational biology, and bioinformatics, these collections aim to move the field beyond descriptive characterization toward actionable clinical interventions.
Conflict of Interest Disclosure
Dr. Tae Hyun Bae, one of the editors of the cancer (搜索) and viral infections (搜索) Research Topic, is listed as an inventor on a published, pending patent (US20260159485) assigned to AUTOTAC, Inc. (搜索), a company founded by the author's former principal investigator. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any potential conflict of interest.