Preamble to the 2015 SITC immunotherapy biomarkers taskforce

The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) has regularly hosted workshops and working groups focused on immunologic monitoring and immune biomarkers. Due to advances in cancer immunotherapy, including positive results from clinical trials testing new agents and combinations, emerging new technologies for measuring aspects of immunity, and novel candidate biomarkers from early phase trials, the SITC Immune Biomarkers Taskforce has reconvened to review the state of the art, identify current hurdles to further success and to make recommendations to the field. Topics being addressed by individual working groups include: (1) validation of candidate biomarkers, (2) identification of the most promising technologies, (3) testing of high throughput immune signatures and (4) investigation of the pre-treatment tumor microenvironment. Resultant recommendations will be published in JITC.