Adoptive cell therapy has transformed hematologic malignancy therapy, yet durable efficacy in solid tumors remains limited by heterogeneous antigens, poor trafficking, immune suppression, cellular exhaustion, and complex manufacturing. This Special Issue will examine how gene editing and synthetic biology can reprogram immune cells to overcome these barriers and enable precise, safe, and scalable therapies for solid cancers. It will connect target discovery and receptor design with cell-state engineering, tumor-microenvironment remodeling, translational models, biomarkers, manufacturing, and early clinical evaluation. Contributions should provide mechanistic or translational insight directly relevant to engineered cellular therapies, including CAR-T, TCR-T, NK-cell, γδ T-cell, or myeloid-cell platforms. Purely descriptive tumor profiling, unmodified cell therapies without an engineering component, and conventional pharmacology without direct relevance to engineered immune cells fall outside the intended scope.

We invite high-quality original research and review articles on topics including, but not limited to:
· Tumor-selective antigens, neoantigens, and multi-omic or spatial strategies for target discovery and validation;
· CAR and TCR design for solid tumors, including affinity tuning, multi-antigen recognition, and logic-gated receptors;
· Engineered NK, γδ T, tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte, macrophage, and other myeloid-cell platforms;
· Genome, epigenome, and transcriptome editing to improve persistence, fitness, memory, and resistance to exhaustion;
· Synthetic gene circuits, armored cells, inducible payloads, remote-control systems, and built-in safety switches;
· Engineering cell trafficking, tumor infiltration, metabolic fitness, and resistance to immunosuppressive microenvironments;
· Allogeneic and off-the-shelf products, including HLA engineering, immune-evasion strategies, and graft-versus-host risk mitigation;
· Viral and non-viral engineering, transposons, mRNA approaches, nanoparticles, and in situ immune-cell programming;
· Rational combinations with checkpoint blockade, cytokines, cancer vaccines, oncolytic viruses, radiotherapy, or targeted agents;
· Organoids, patient-derived models, humanized systems, single-cell and spatial profiling, and predictive biomarkers;
· Manufacturing, potency assays, product characterization, quality control, scalability, and cost-conscious implementation;
· Clinical trial design, pharmacology, safety, resistance, patient selection, long-term follow-up, and regulatory considerations.

We welcome original research articles and review articles from the fields of cancer immunotherapy, gene and genome engineering, synthetic biology, tumor immunology, cell biology, translational oncology, biomarker science, and cell-therapy manufacturing.