INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Letter from the Editor| JITC Editor Picks|Thank You to JITC Reviewers|Popular Archive Articles
Letter from the Editor
Hello JITC
Readers,
Indeed, “it takes a village“ for JITC to receive, review, improve and then promote the important work in immuno-oncology that we have the privilege to consider and develop in our Journal. We express our gratitude to all our Section and Associate Editors as we head into this New Year. I would like to welcome the new editors joining us and also send a sincere thank you to those whose terms concluded at the end of last year. We have an extraordinary group of committed individuals who are creating the rigorous and robust discipline that IO has become, and that we chronicle.
A special thanks is also in order to our reviewers, the more than 1,700 volunteers who generously donated their time to evaluate and critique a record number of submissions to JITC in 2025. See the special feature below for more information on becoming a reviewer and the benefits of reviewing for our journal.
Lastly, I would especially like to thank the dedicated JITC staff, including Assistant Managing Editor Matthew Erickson and Project Coordinator Rebekah Wells, who oversee and manage the administrative tasks, along with the colleagues at our publisher, BMJ. I am also very pleased to announce that our veteran Director of Scientific Publications from SITC, Angela Kilbert, CAE, is now taking on fulltime responsibilities as Executive Managing Editor of JITC! We invite our readers and SITC members to reach out to us for thoughts about how to continue to find and publish the most important and cutting-edge papers in our field.
Partnering to Improve Patient Outcomes
Much like editors, reviewers, and staff work in concert to improve manuscripts, partnerships are necessary to advance patient outcomes. This was made clear to me while attending the recent ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in San Francisco. The meeting demonstrated the remarkable progress in individual malignancies, necessitating a fine focus on different individual tumors on each of the three days (gastroesophageal; pancreatobiliary; colorectal). Interesting to me, some participants, finely focused on one tumor type, would only come for a day! This demonstrates the silos that oncology has progressively developed to sustain the rapid rate of progress in the fundamental understanding and targeting of these diseases.
A highlight of the meeting was the opportunity to hear the plenary address from the former Director of the National Cancer Institute, Kimryn Rathmell, MD, PhD, now CEO of the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. With the increasing fragmented diseases, including pancreatic cancer, we now need to consider not only the underlying basic science and principles of targeted therapies (coupled, when possible, with immunotherapies) but also how to get out treatments to our patients. Dr. Rathmell calls these necessary dyad partnerships between community providers and academic oncologists, correcting to triad to include the patient themselves. “I love the activity that’s happening in pancreatic cancer right now,” she said. “I would love to see breakthroughs that make pancreatic cancer no longer a ‘death sentence’, much like the transformation that melanoma has seen over the past 20 years.”
Highlighted Manuscripts
This month, I would like to emphasize the yet not fully met need of gastrointestinal malignancies and focus on “what the study adds” messaging from the articles themselves. I encourage you to peruse them and the other papers published this past month.
Regards,
Michael T. Lotze, MD
Editor-in-Chief
Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer