
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.