Letter From the Editor - June

Hello JITC Readers,

This edition of the JITC Digest is extra special because June is Cancer Immunotherapy Month™. As JITC readers, you are already aware of the transformational impact of immunotherapy and we welcome you to take advantage of the myriad educational growth and professional development opportunities for clinicians, researchers, and patients offered by SITC during June.

 

June has already been a banner month for immunotherapy, especially for our clinical colleagues. Those of you who attended the American Society for Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting just a few weeks ago—or who followed JITC’s Twitter commentary—likely saw the panoply of oral abstracts, posters, plenary addresses, and education sessions all featuring impressive data showing benefit for a variety of immunotherapy approaches across numerous disease settings. If the results of RELATIVITY have you seeking more information on LAG3 or other targets, be sure to revisit JITC’s Immune Checkpoints Beyond PD-1 Series.

 

Of course, the clinical successes of immunotherapy stemmed from years of basic and translational research, more of which is needed to bring about the next generation of therapeutic agents to overcome resistance and expand the population of patients that may benefit. This month’s original research offers insight into mechanisms of resistance to a variety of immunotherapeutic modalities, with intriguing implications for future development.

 

Francisco J Cueto et al uncover paradoxical inhibition of Flt3L-mediated tumor clearance mediated by a surface receptor involved in cross-priming. Improved tumor control in mice with a novel, extended half-life recombinant IL-15 is demonstrated by Takahiro Miyazaki and colleagues. For the first time, hypoxia is shown to mediate anti-PD-1 resistance in head and neck cancer by Dan P Zandberg et al. Finally, Zhiliang Bai and colleagues identify functional differences in CAR T cells generated from healthy donors and patients.

 

After reading this month’s JITC, continue to celebrate Cancer Immunotherapy Month™ by supporting our sister journals in the immunotherapy space. You can find links to other specialized publications aiming to advance the field forward in this month’s special highlights section.

 

Best regards,

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

To view the entire April 2021 JITC Digest, please click here. 

June President's Message: Mentoring a Generation of Researchers, a Conversation with Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg

Dear Colleagues,

Before I announce this month’s fireside chat companion, I wanted to make sure you all have had the opportunity to view the recently published diversity panel discussion on barriers to Asians and Pacific Islanders in medicine and research. This program, conducted in collaboration with the Chinese American Hematologic and Oncologist Network (CAHON) and the Indo-American Cancer Association (IACA), was completed in conjunction with the SITC Diversity and Inclusion Task Force’s efforts to raise awareness of barriers that exist within our field for under-represented minorities. Such conversations can be a tremendous learning tool for leaders in institutions around the world, and I look forward to our society continuing the discussion on this and other related topics into the future. Please click here to view the panel discussion.

June is Cancer Immunotherapy Month™, and I could not think of a better scientist and person to host for this month’s fireside chat than Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD. Dr. Rosenberg is a Senior Investigator in the Surgery Branch at the National Cancer Institute with more than 40 years of experience. You can click the link in the preceding sentence to view his official biography, but as you all likely know already, Dr. Rosenberg is among the most influential scientists in our field’s history. He has been – and continues to be – a mentor to countless researchers through the years, including myself. To recognize his contributions to the field, SITC last year established the Rosenberg Scholars Award, an honor he and I discussed in our chat.

I pulled out a small portion of my discussion with Dr. Rosenberg and inserted below for the purposes of this message, but I highly recommend viewing the entire chat on the SITC YouTube channel here.

Myself: What do you think the future holds (for cancer care) 10, 20, 30 years from now? …What do you think the treatments will be then?

Dr. Rosenberg: So we’ve had surgery with us for over 2,000 years, there are Egyptian papyri that talk about cancer being cut out. We’ve had chemotherapy, which we date to chemical warfare research during the Second World War in 1942, where nitrogen mustard caused laboratory workers to be exposed accidentally, would develop lymphopenias that led to the first application of chemotherapy for cancer. Radiation therapy dated from the year after (Wilhelm) Roentgen discovered x-rays in 1895, so we’ve had these treatments around and they’ve constantly been improved over time, but these have been tiny improvements.

We’re confronted today still with the situation that tells us that if you have metastatic cancer from anyone of these solid epithelial tumors, you’re not going to be cured by anything that’s now available. But we have examples with checkpoint modulators, you can get durable responses, with immunotherapy durable responses, and I would imagine all three of those original treatments will continue to be improved.

The discussion featured a number of topics, including his background and interest in cancer research, the state of cancer vaccines, words of wisdom for young investigators and much more. I hope you all enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Thanks again to Dr. Rosenberg for joining for this month’s fireside chat.

Sincerely,

 

Patrick Hwu, MD

SITC President