JITC Letter from the Editor - January 2020

Dear JITC Readers,

Welcome to the first JITC Digest of 2020! The past decade has seen cancer immunotherapy advance to an incredible degree, and the pace of innovation is not looking to slow down any time soon. It is an exciting time for the field and for the journal as JITC continues to expand and evolve to serve the community.

To support our continued growth, JITC has partnered with a new publisher, BMJ, which will allow the journal to offer an improved experience for authors, editors, reviewers and readers at all steps during the publication process. You can read more about the transition in a special editorial in the January issue.

Additionally, JITC will now offer two new sections focusing on exciting emerging areas in our field: Immune Cell Therapy and Immune Cell Engineering, edited by Dr. Marcela V Maus, and Oncolytic Immunotherapy, edited by Dr. Howard L Kaufman. We’re thrilled to help usher these important and innovative approaches into more widespread clinical use.

The highlighted papers in this month’s digest truly exemplify the tremendous pace of advancement within the cancer immunotherapy field, especially in the area of immune checkpoints. When the journal was first established in 2013, no agents targeting the programmed death (PD)-1 receptor or its ligand had been approved by the FDA and now checkpoint blockade has become a mainstay in the treatment of numerous malignancies.

Kidney cancer is one such disease for which checkpoint blockade has radically altered the treatment landscape, motivating SITC to update its Cancer Immunotherapy Guidelines. You can read the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer consensus statement on immunotherapy for the treatment of advanced renal cell carcinoma by Brian Rini et al. in this issue.

And our understanding of immune checkpoints continues to progress. Almost every aspect in the translational research pipeline is represented in the manuscripts in this month’s digest, including characterization of the tumor microenvironment, pre-clinical validation for two novel checkpoint blockade strategies, and the first retrospective study of the tolerability of anti-PD-1 or anti-PD-L1 therapy in patients with pre-existing or newly diagnosed paraneoplastic syndromes.

With best regards,

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

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

JITC Letter from the Editor - December 2019

Dear JITC Readers,

This is the final JITC digest of 2019, and we are ending the year on a historic note with December’s issue containing the most-ever papers published in a single month since the journal’s inception! It has been an exciting year for JITC, and we look forward to what the future holds as the immunotherapy field continues to expand and evolve.

The highlighted papers in this month’s JITC digest truly exemplify some of the most exciting areas of research in our field, spanning preclinical models to human trials and adding new insight into the contribution of the tumor microenvironment to disease progression and immunotherapy resistance as well as the development of novel immunotherapeutic agents.

Be sure to read the Editor Picks below about microenvironment-targeting therapeutics for the reprogramming of myeloid-derived suppressor cells and for the selective depletion of tumor-associated macrophages, gene-edited “off-the-shelf” CAR T cells for the treatment of glioblastoma, preclinical validation for a new checkpoint inhibitor target in ovarian cancer, newly described mechanisms of immunotherapy resistance in melanoma, a deeper understanding of the two types of secondary bone metastases in prostate cancer, and a phase 2 trial describing dendritic cell vaccines for prostate cancer that that induce clinically meaningful immune responses.

With best regards,

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

To view the entire December 2019 JITC Digest, please click here. 

Get to Know Sentinel Author: Kushal Prajapati

Kushal Prajapati

Name: Kushal Prajapati

Title: PhD Candidate

Employer: Loyola University Chicago

When and why did you become a SITC member?

I joined SITC in June of 2017 for many reasons. I have always felt that it is very important, especially for young scientists, to step outside of their labs and engage with researchers working in their field to keep up with the latest developments and gain fresh perspectives. This also allows you to join the on-going discussions about the major challenges in the field. Being in the Immuno-Oncology field, I thought SITC was a perfect platform offering all these opportunities! 

Get to Know Sentinel Author: Aliyah Weinstein

Name: Aliyah Weinstein

Weinstein

Title: Graduate Student Researcher

Employer: University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

When and why did you become a SITC member?

I’ve been a SITC member since this summer, though I previously attended some satellite events organized by the society. As I am thinking ahead to a career in the field of cancer immunotherapy, it only made sense to join SITC to establish a stronger connection with the field and grow my network.