دانلود کتاب روش‌ها و پروتکل‌های ملانوما، ویرایش دوم

In the summer of 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic completely upended the world as we then knew it, I was on vacation with my family when I received an unexpected email from Methods in Molecular Biology Series Editor John Walker, inviting me to serve as editor of a new volume for the series focused on melanoma. Having entered graduate school to study tumor immunology in 2001, I had spent the formative part of my professional training studying immune suppression by melanoma, and I was fortunate to witness during this time the explosion of cancer immunotherapy as a result of early preclinical and clinical work focused largely on this particular disease. Almost 18 years to the day from when I first entered the field, and having by then established my own research program focused on anti-melanoma immunity and cancer genetics, I read John’s email with keen interest and jumped at the opportunity to assemble a team of leading experts to contribute to the important volume. That decision culminated nearly 2 years later, in March 2021, with the publication of the first edition of Melanoma: Methods and Protocols, a collection of 45 chapters highlighting cutting-edge approaches for studying and treating the disease, developed and optimized by investigators who have dedicated their careers to this specific cancer. Melanoma, much as it was in 2021 and just as it had been long before, remains today a disease of global public health significance. Although therapeutic advances over the last two and a half decades have dramatically improved the prognosis for patients with the disease, worldwide melanoma incidence has also steadily increased during this time, and at a faster rate than for most other cancers. As a result, annual mortality from the disease has continued to rise despite improved treatment options for patients. With such trends expected to continue until at least 2050, global melanoma incidence and mortality are both expected to nearly double—with nearly 600,000 new cases and 120,000 deaths anticipated per year—by the middle of the century. As I often impress upon my students when discussing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a low mortality rate can still be quite tragic when disease incidence is high. Recognizing the challenges that lie ahead, I nevertheless remain optimistic about the rapid progress that is being made in our understanding and treatment of melanoma. Even in the relatively short time since the first edition of this volume was published, several new therapeutics have garnered FDA approval based on their efficacy against the disease. Among these new therapies are novel immune checkpoint blockade regimens such as Opdualag®, which targets in tandem the PD-1 and LAG3 inhibitory receptors that often restrain anti-tumor T lymphocyte responses and which has proven superior to PD-1-blocking monotherapy; a first-in-class (for uveal melanoma) bispecific T-cell engager that directs CD3+ T cells to gp100-HLA-A*02:01 complexes on melanoma cells (KIMMTRACK®); and the first ever tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL)-based adoptive cell transfer therapy (AMTAGVI®) for any cancer. At the same time that these clinical breakthroughs have been made, technological advances have also revolutionized the ways in which we study and understand melanoma, with single-cell analysis and spatial biology emerging as particularly powerful tools that are yielding critical insights into overall tumor heterogeneity and the array of interactions between cancerous and non-cancerous cells that drive tumor evolution. In this regard, much of the progress that we envision going forward will depend not only on achieving a more nuanced understanding of melanoma itself but also on gaining a greater appreciation of the ways in which melanoma progression is ultimately influenced by the ecological framework of the host. With these ambitious goals in mind, we now present this second edition of Melanoma: Methods and Protocols, a comprehensive volume that features 14 chapters updated from the first edition together with 26 new chapters, all from leading investigators at the forefront of basic and clinical melanoma research. Divided into seven parts, the volume opens with an extensive review of the diverse model systems that have been developed to study melanoma, followed by chapters describing detailed methodology for genetically engineering melanoma cells for various research applications. Parts II and III include a series of chapters focused on 2D and 3D cell culture systems for investigating various aspects of melanoma biology, including tumor metabolism, cell migration/invasion, and adhesion. These chapters are followed, in Part IV, by several protocols that have been optimized for the isolation and study of circulating melanoma cells and melanoma-derived extracellular vesicles. Part V shifts focus toward melanoma imaging techniques and includes review and protocol chapters relevant to fluorescent and theranostic imaging as well as spatial imaging at both the intratumoral and intracellular levels. Part VI then transitions to computational omics-based approaches for studying melanoma and features chapters on microRNA profiling as well as several metabolomic and microbiomic profiling approaches that can be employed for biomarker identification in preclinical, clinical, and veterinary settings. Finally, the volume concludes in Part VII with methods related to the development and testing of melanoma diagnostics and therapeutics, including those relevant to monoclonal antibody generation and analysis, nucleic acid delivery to tumor tissue, assessment of microbiome-associated influences on immunotherapy, and the generation and characterization of tumor-targeting chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cells. As with the first edition, I am indebted to many people who have sacrificed their time and energy to make this second edition possible. First, to my contributing authors, I am beyond grateful for your support of this project. I am inspired by your work and incredibly proud of the volume we have produced, and I know that it will be a tremendous resource for the many scientists and clinicians who share our passion for understanding and treating this cancer we have chosen. I thank you as well for your prompt responses to my inquiries throughout the editing process and for graciously putting up with what I suspect may have sometimes felt like “nagging” emails amidst your many other commitments! Though I am fortunate to have worked with some of you personally over the course of my career, I have come to view all of you as colleagues, and I hope to work with each of you again in the future.