JITC Letter From the Editor - July 2020

Dear JITC Readers,

I am thrilled to share exciting news with you in this latest edition of the JITC digest. This year, JITC increased its impact factor to 9.913, making the journal the highest ranked fully open access immunology journal and in the top 8 percent of all journals in the oncology and immunology categories. The ranking not only reflects the increasing prominence of the cancer immunotherapy field as a whole, but also the outstanding efforts of our JITC editors and expert reviewers, who work tirelessly to ensure that the journal publishes only the top-tier submissions month after month. With a sharp increase in manuscripts submitted to JITC during the last two years, we remain committed to a high standard of timely peer review and to facilitating the publishing of high quality content for our readership.

This month is no exception, with a total of 63 articles publishing in JITC during June. As always, the research spans a wide diversity of topics representing almost every step in the path from bench to bedside. The papers highlighted in this month’s digest include basic research, translational science and human trials.

On the basic science side, Lorena Carmona Rodríguez and colleagues uncover a novel, cell context-specific role for WNT signaling in controlling access to tumors by infiltrating lymphocytes. In another study investigating changes to the tumor microenvironment, Simon P Keam et al demonstrate through NanoString immune gene expression profiling, digital spatial profiling, and high-throughput immune cell multiplex immunohistochemistry analysis on samples from human patients, that high dose-rate brachytherapy converts immunologically cold tumors to hot.

On the therapeutics side, Matteo Libero Baroni et al provide evidence that CD123-directed chimeric antigen receptor T cells are profoundly myeloablative, opening the door to a potential bridge to transplant therapy for acute myeloid leukemia. Victoria A Brentvile and colleagues develop a novel tumor vaccine based on a mixture of three citrullinated peptides that takes advantage of a toll-like receptor agonist adjuvant to dramatically reduce the effective therapeutic dose. Additionally, Adi Reches and colleagues identify a potentially promising new target for checkpoint inhibition in Nectin4, which is a TIGIT ligand with highly restricted expression to tumor cells.

Finally, David S Hong and colleagues demonstrate significant increases in tumor-infiltrating CD3+ and CD8+ T cells in patients with advanced solid tumors after treatment with a small-molecule antagonist of the E-type prostanoid receptor 4 in a first-in-human clinical trial.

I hope you enjoy these articles, and all of the excellent papers published this month in JITC. Also, be sure to peruse this month’s JITC's Reading List for a selection of papers of interest from other journals.

Best regards,

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

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