Immune Strategies for Gastrointestinal Cancer

This book provides an overview of the available evidence surrounding immunotherapy in gastrointestinal cancers, and discusses its future place in clinical practice.Immunotherapy has celebrated some astonishing therapeutic successes in a variety of cancer types and is becoming increasingly relevant in daily clinical practice. Currently, the predominant class of immunotherapeutic drugs is the so-called checkpoint inhibitors, which disengage the physiological brakes on the immune system, enabling a more effective anti-cancer immune response. Malignancies of the gastrointestinal tract, which account for the majority of cancer cases worldwide, are a major cause of morbidity and mortality, creating an urgent need for more effective therapies. A large number of clinical trials have evaluated the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy in gastrointestinal malignancies and demonstrated its potential in certain subsets of patients. This book will appeal to a wide readership, including oncologists, health care professionals in general and biomedical scientists.

About the Author

Markus Moehler , MD, studied medicine in Heidelberg, Basel and New York City. After his doctoral dissertation supervised by Nobel-Prize laureate Prof. zur Hausen and postgraduate studies at the German Cancer Research Center, he joined the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, (Prof. Dr. P.R. Galle) at the University Medical Center Mainz. In 2005, he qualified as a gastroenterologist, become a consultant in gastroenterology and GI oncology. He is an active member of the EORTC GI board, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) and the German Arbeitsgemeinschaft Internistische Onkologie (AIO), where he is a member of the colorectal cancer group and team leader of the upper GI group (esophagus/gastric cancer). For the German DGVS, together with M. Ebert he leads the steering committee on gastric cancer and is responsible for the DGVS guidelines on gastric cancer. Markus Moehler is and has been principal investigator on numerous national and international clinical studies. For the German AIO and the EORTC, he has organized several randomized phase II-III trials (including IIT studies) on GI cancers and has been involved in developing various novel agents, including checkpoint inhibitors.

Friedrich Foerster , MD, Mag. iur., holds medical and law degrees from the University of Heidelberg. For his doctoral thesis, he spent a year in the laboratory of Ronald A. Depinho MD at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School in Boston. After graduation, he worked as a consultant at McKinsey, Inc. From 2012 until 2019, he was a resident and fellow at the First Department of Medicine at the University Medical Center Mainz and a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Translational Immunology. His research focuses on the immunology of liver cancer and metastasis, the development of nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems and immune-related gene signatures in gastrointestinal malignancies. Since 2019, he has been working as a gastroenterologist and GI oncologist at the First Medical Department at the University Medical Center Mainz and is the medical head of the Core Facility Bioinformatics.