In the ever-evolving landscape of cancer research, immuno-oncology stands as a beacon of hope, offering novel avenues for treatment. This study capitalizes on the vast repository of immuno-oncology-related scientific documents within the CAS Content Collection, totaling over 350,000, encompassing journals and patents. Through a pioneering approach melding natural language processing with the CAS indexing system, we unveil over 300 emerging concepts, depicted in a comprehensive “Trend Landscape Map”. These concepts, spanning therapeutic targets, biomarkers, and types of cancers among others, are hierarchically organized into eight major categories. Delving deeper, our analysis furnishes detailed quantitative metrics showcasing growth trends over the past three years. Our findings not only provide valuable insights for guiding future research endeavors but also underscore the merit of tapping the vast and unparalleled breadth of existing scientific information to derive profound insights.
A “Trend Landscape Map” of emerging concepts in immuno-oncology has been crafted based on a comprehensive analysis of the extensive CAS Content Collection. The map has been constructed by utilizing a novel Natural Language Processing algorithm in combination with extensive curation by subject matter experts, resulting in identification of >300 emergent topics across eight main areas of interest. The map acts as a visual aid, with detailed quantitative metrics of recent growth illustrating the spread of emerging ideas in immuno-oncology.
Cancer has been declared as one of the leading causes of death by the World Health Organization (WHO). (1) The global economic burden of cancer is undeniable, with projections estimating nearly $25 trillion in the year 2050. (2) In the United States alone, ∼600K cancer deaths were estimated for 2023. (3) In this bleak landscape, immuno-oncology─a field at the forefront of cancer research and treatment─has emerged as a beacon of hope in the fight against various types of cancers. Harnessing the body’s immune system to recognize, target, and eliminate tumor cells, immuno-oncology’s extraordinary promise and rapid growth have captured the attention of researchers and pharmaceutical industries worldwide. This burgeoning potential and heightened interest are vividly reflected in the growing number of scientific publications (Figure 1A), especially in the past four years, and the escalating number of drugs under evaluation in clinical trials since 2015 (Figure 1B), accounting for ∼5,500 clinical trials currently ongoing across various clinical phases.
Figure 1. (A) Overall growth in publications (journals and patents) pertaining to immuno-oncology from the CAS Content Collection over the past two decades (2003–2022). The blue bars represent journal publications while the yellow line represents new patent publications, and the gray line represents the total number of patent publications reflective of overall patent activity. (B) Growth in the number of drugs in the field of immuno-oncology in the preclinical stage over the past two decades (2003–2022); data retrieved from Pharmaprojects.
Among the better-known cancer immunotherapies are immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) and antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs). The discovery and development of ICIs has been revolutionary for cancer therapy and has led to a paradigm shift. (4) The therapeutic success of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved ICIs Keytruda (5) (pembrolizumab; Merck & Co.) and Opdivo (6) (nivolumab; Bristol-Myers Squibb) in treating melanoma (7) and non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) (8) among other types of cancer has been encouraging. Besides ICIs, U.S. FDA-approved ADCs such as Kadcyla (9) (ado-trastuzumab emtansine; Genentech Inc.), Besponsa (10) (inotuzumab ozogamicin; Pfizer Inc.), and Elahere (11) (mirvetuximab soravtansine; ImmunoGen Inc.) have also shown tremendous success in the treatment of metastatic breast cancer, (12) acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), (13) and ovarian cancer, (14) respectively. The remarkable success of ADCs (15) has meant that the scope of ADCs is expanding beyond the boundaries of cancer.
Out of the 55 novel drugs that gained U.S. FDA approval in 2023 alone, (16) over 12% are associated with cancer immunotherapy, including the monoclonal antibodies (Loqtorz/toripalimab-tpzi (17) and Zynyz/retifanlimab-dlwr (18)) against the immune checkpoint molecule programmed cell death 1 receptor (PD-1) and bispecific T-cell engagers directed toward CD20 (Columvi/glofitamab (19)) and B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) (Elrexfio/elranatamab-bcmm (20)). The therapeutic and commercial success of ICIs and ADCs and the continued regulatory approvals of new cancer immunotherapeutic drugs have translated to an impetus for pharmaceutical companies to continue investing in this field with a sustained interest in developing newer immunotherapeutic drugs. This is exemplified by the nearly $16 billion in investments for cancer immunotherapy in 2022–2023 (Pitchbook (21)).
The pursuit of advancements in immuno-oncology by academic and commercial organizations has led to proliferative, sustained, and rampant expansion of journal and patent publications. In this report, leveraging the extensive CAS Content Collection, we delved deep into this fast-growing corpus of scientific publications, aiming to identify emerging trends that will be invaluable to researchers in this vibrant community. We utilized a novel natural language processing (NLP)-based algorithm (22) in combination with extensive curation by subject matter experts, resulting in quantitative identification of >300 emergent topics across eight main areas of interest. Moreover, our analysis allowed us to capture ideas that appear to be in the very early/nascent stages of emergence. We have designed a trend landscape map to illustrate the spread of emerging ideas in immuno-oncology across a wide range of topics with an emphasis on their growth over the past 3 years.
Our data set comprises ∼350K publications extracted from the CAS Content Collection, the largest human-compiled multidisciplinary database of published documents and substances, employing a comprehensive search query developed by subject matter experts. The extracted data, consisting of a wide range of information, including extensive bibliographic information, CAS indexed concepts, and substances, was subjected to NLP (22) to identify frequently used phrases (for a detailed description of the methods, see the Supporting Information and Figure S1). Subsequently, these phrases underwent exhaustive manual scrutiny by subject matter experts, forming the basis for calculating the relative rates of publication growth over the period 2020–2022.
The identified emerging concepts were categorized into eight major domains: targets, therapies, interleukins, RNA-related, side effects, mechanism-based, biomarkers, and types of cancer. To visually represent these trending and emerging concepts, we constructed a trend landscape map (Figure 2) featuring a hierarchical arrangement of emerging concepts within pertinent groups and incorporated data from journal and patent publications. Most identified concepts ended up being clustered in the following four categories: types of targets, therapies, cancers, and biomarkers. The trend landscape map has been designed to provide, at a glance, the average fold increase in publications over 2020–2022 and the number of publications over 2020–2022 using a color scale and symbols, respectively. Broadly speaking, the identified concepts grew at a modest (1.1 to 1.5×), fast (1.6 to 2×), or very fast (2 to >3×)
