JITC Letter from the Editor - April 2020

Dear JITC Readers,

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge almost all aspects of daily life, JITC remains unwavering in our commitment to publishing the very best that the immunotherapy field has to offer. Although SARS-CoV-2 is radically changing how we as a community care for our patients and conduct our research, you can count on JITC as a constant source for new findings and important insights from across the spectrum of immuno-oncology. 

This month, the JITC digest offers several papers that develop intriguing strategies to boost antitumor immune responses. Jahangir Ahmed and colleagues engineered a replication-competent oncolytic vaccinia virus that delivers IL-12 to the tumor microenvironment, prolonging survival and controlling lung metastases when administered as an adjuvant to surgical excision in mouse models. Modulation of the tumor microenvironment also synergized with checkpoint blockade in a paper by Lucas A. Horn et al., where combined inhibition of TGF-beta and IL-8 signaling attenuated epithelial to mesenchymal transition in models of both breast and lung cancer. Additionally, Yong Li and colleagues revealed a key role in signaling through the innate immune danger-recognition sensor RIG-I in the development of interferon resistance in melanoma tumor-regenerating cells, identifying STAT3 as a potential therapeutic target. 

Also this month, in a paper that will surely prove reassuring, Nicholas Bevins and colleagues rigorously analyzed the impact of different methods of calculating tumor mutational burden and found good correlation between approaches. 

Finally, be sure not to miss an outstanding review by Lorenzo Galluzzi et al. that delivers a thorough overview of immunologic cell death with detailed discussions of the biological mechanisms leading to the establishment of immunologic memory, the available assays to measure key phenomena, and the hurdles to overcome for translation into clinical benefit. 

Best regards,

Pedro J. Romero, MD
Editor-in-Chief, Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer

To view the entire April 2020 JITC Digest, please click here. 

JITC Letter from the Editor - March 2020

Dear JITC Readers,

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global emergency of unprecedented scale, placing an incredible burden on the healthcare system in every affected nation. As JITC readers, you are at the forefront of the outbreak, and, on behalf of the journal as well as SITC as a whole, we wholeheartedly offer gratitude for your ongoing efforts while wishing health and safety for you, your families and your patients.

Publication at JITC continues with this March edition of the JITC digest, which spotlights our commitment to publishing high quality scholarly work in a variety of formats. The journal is quickly becoming not only a leading repository of original research papers in the immunotherapy field, but also a go-to source for top-tier reviews and cutting-edge short hypotheses and case reports.   

Original research articles in this month's JITC digest are similar inasmuch as they describe processes for building tools, but they originate from opposite ends of the translational research spectrum. In a fully computational work that performed all experiments in silico with publically available datasets, Jie Sun and colleagues identify a long non-coding RNA signature as an indicator of immune cell infiltration in non-small cell lung cancer that was predictive of patient outcomes and response to checkpoint blockade. The other paper, from Ssu-Hsueh Tseng et al., describes extensive and elegant "wet" lab work to develop and validate a novel genetically induced mouse model of peritoneal metastasis in high-grade serous carcinoma.

Publishing excellent reviews is a priority for the journal, and we're proud this month to feature a comprehensive discussion of adenosinergic signaling in tumor immunosuppression with a focus on the potential of CD39 as a potential target for checkpoint therapy by David Allard, Bertrand Allard and John Stagg. This is part of JITC's growing Immune Checkpoints Beyond PD-1 review series.  

Finally, Esther Lutgens and Tom Seijkens present a hypothesis that checkpoint inhibition could promote the inflammatory processes in the vascular wall that drive atherosclerosis progression—a concept that merits further study.

As JITC continues to grow and thrive, the efforts and insights of the journal's peer reviewers are always appreciated. It's this "behind the scenes" work that ensures JITC remains the leading journal in the immunotherapy field. If you would like to support the journal while also gaining the many benefits of being a peer reviewer, we are welcoming applications, which you may submit through the SITC Volunteer Portal.

Best regards,

Pedro J. Romero, MD
Editor-in-Chief, Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer

To view the entire March 2020 JITC Digest, please click here. 

Cancer: A Genetic and Immunological Disorder

by Praveen Bommareddy

Goal: The primary goal of my blog series is to contribute to SITC’s mission in educating patients, clinicians, and researchers about the recent advancements in immunotherapy. I am particularly interested in the use of genetically modified (non-pathogenic) viruses as immune modulators for cancer treatment. 

In this introductory edition of my blog series, I would like to provide an overview of cancer immunotherapy and a brief description on why immunotherapies may not always work well due to heterogeneity in tumor phenotypes and various mechanisms that suppress immune response against cancers.

Target audience: Patients and their families, clinicians, and researchers.