Genomics-Driven Immunotherapy: Advancing Cancer Treatment through Personalized Approaches

Cancer is a complex disease involving the abnormal growth and dissemination of cells. The traditional treatments of cancer suffer from challenges like drug resistance and non-specificity. However, immunotherapy has become a promising alternative, leveraging the body's immune system to attack cancer cells. However, the variability in patients' responses to immunotherapy underscores the significance of personalized treatment strategies. Genomics is key to understanding how genetic changes drive tumor development and response to immunotherapy. Genomic profiling techniques, such as NGS, enable the identification of molecular biomarkers, such as Tumor Mutational Burden (TMB) and Microsatellite Instability (MSI), that predict response to immunotherapy. Furthermore, the Tumor Microenvironment (TME), consisting of different cells and molecules surrounding the tumor, plays an important role in cancer progression and treatment outcomes. In this review, we highlight how genomics-driven approaches are accelerating cancer immunotherapy. It presents how genomics can be used to personalize immunotherapy for cancer and discusses challenges such as tumor heterogeneity and resistance to therapy, which require innovative technologies such as single-cell RNA sequencing, AI, and machine learning in immunogenomics, and liquid biopsies to refine treatment strategies. In the future, the incorporation of CRISPR-based gene editing, personalized neoantigen vaccines, and combination therapies holds great promise for transforming cancer treatment.