Emerging Concepts in Immuno-Oncology: Insights from Natural Language Processing-Driven Co-Occurrence Analysis.

Immuno-oncology, a rapidly evolving field at the forefront of cancer research, leverages the body's immune system to fight cancer. In this follow-up report, we extend our natural language processing-based analysis to pinpoint the context of emergence of the previously identified emerging concepts. To achieve this relational analysis, we devised a method to identify terms co-occurring in a single sentence in the title or abstract of >350,000 journal and patent publications. The focus of the current study was on intergroup co-occurrences, namely between therapeutic targets, biomarkers, types of therapy, and types of cancer. In our discussion, we have highlighted potentially emerging co-occurring concept pairs between each of the groups exhibiting rapid growth in publications over the past few years but an overall small number of publications. This analysis provides contextual information that may be useful in directing future research efforts in a valuable direction.