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Current trends in cancer immunotherapy: a literature-mining analysis

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Abstract

Cancer immunotherapy is a rapidly growing field that is completely transforming oncology care. Mining this knowledge base for biomedically important information is becoming increasingly challenging, due to the expanding number of scientific publications, and the dynamic evolution of this subject with time. In this study, we have employed a literature-mining approach that was used to analyze the cancer immunotherapy-related publications listed in PubMed and quantify emerging trends. A total of 93,033 publications published in 5055 journals have been retrieved, and 141 meaningful topics have been identified, which were further classified into eight distinct categories. Statistical analysis indicates a mean annual increase in the number of published papers of approximately 8% in the last 20 years. The research topics that exhibited the highest trends included “immune checkpoint inhibitors,” “tumor microenvironment,” “HPV vaccination,” “CAR T-cells,” and “gene mutations/tumor profiling.” The top identified cancer types included “lung,” “colorectal,” and “breast cancer,” and a shift in popularity from hematological to solid tumors was observed. As regards clinical research, a transition from early phase clinical trials to randomized control trials was recorded, indicating that the field is entering a more advanced phase of development. Overall, this mining approach provided an unbiased analysis of the cancer immunotherapy literature in a time-conserving and scale-efficient manner.

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Funding

This research is partially co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) through the Operational Programme “Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning” in the context of the project “Reinforcement of Postdoctoral Researchers - 2nd Cycle” (MIS-5033021), implemented by the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiotherapy/Oncology, School of Medicine, Democritus University of Thrace, Alexandroupolis, Greece

    Stamatia Pouliliou

  2. School of Medicine, Democritus University of Thrace, Alexandroupolis, Greece

    Christos Nikolaidis

  3. Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center, Xanthi, Greece

    George Drosatos

Authors
  1. Stamatia Pouliliou
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  2. Christos Nikolaidis
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  3. George Drosatos
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All authors have contributed equally. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Stamatia Pouliliou.

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Appendix

List of identified topics

Table 1 List of topics organized in 8 categories (and 5 subcategories), showing the regression analysis results, the overall popularity metric and the respective rank of the topics
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Pouliliou, S., Nikolaidis, C. & Drosatos, G. Current trends in cancer immunotherapy: a literature-mining analysis. Cancer Immunol Immunother 69, 2425–2439 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00262-020-02630-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00262-020-02630-8

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