In the early ’60s, Jacques Miller demonstrated that T cells, which require the thymus and are named “T cells,” in contrast to Bruce Glick’s demonstration of B cells arising from the Bursa of Fabricius in birds, were a separate and defined lineage of lymphocytes. Now we have several means to measure ‘thymic health,’ including CT measures of the thymus size and density within the superior mediastinum, so-called T cell receptor excision circles (TRECs) in the blood using RT-PCR, and full T and B cell repertoire analysis (the adaptome) in the periphery and within the tumor (diversity and clonality, respectively). Integrating these studies into modern understanding of aging, cancer, and response to therapy represent exciting opportunities for the field.
Oncolytic and Local Immunotherapy Section
One of our newest sections in JITC focuses on how local therapies can change systemic biology, perhaps mediated in part by emergence and recruitment of new T cells arising from the thymus. It is headed up by Section Editor, Howard Kaufman, MD, FACS at Harvard and Ankyra Therapeutics. He is joined by Associate Editors Praveen Bommareddy, PhD at Replimune Inc.; Darrel J. Irvine, PhD at Scripps Research in LaJolla; Balveen Kaur, PhD at LSU LCMC Health Cancer Center; Liang-Tzung Lin, PhD at Taipei Medical University; Samuel Rabkin, PhD at Massachusetts General Hospital; K. Dane Wittrup, PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Dmitriy Zamarin, MD, PhD at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Recently Howard and colleagues (Joshua Brody, MD from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Tanja de Gruijl, PhD at Amsterdam University Medical Centers; and Aurélien Marabelle, MD, PhD at Gustave Roussy) ran a virtual summit with SITC on Intralesional Therapy. We are now preparing a special series headed up by this group. The first manuscript of the series and some of the original research we will share with you for this month’s digest.