Blogs

This last month on April 29^th we celebrated with the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS) International Day of Immunology. On this day, they focused on regulatory T cells (Tregs) and their role in cancer as well as other immunologic settings. This is timely given the recent Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded in late 2025 to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work identifying and characterizing Tregs.  

A webinar, celebrating the day, was given online by Bruno Silva-Santos from Lisbon, Portugal, who focuses on the elusive MHC-unrestricted gamma delta T cells. He presented surprising studies in murine models of colorectal cancer in the mouse. There, he and his group found that adoptive transfer of the delta one subset provided little antitumor effects by themselves but required co-application of both blocking antibodies to PD-1 and TIGIT, suggesting that there was a critical role for Tregs in considering their application clinically. In additional studies coming out soon in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Rafael Blanco-Dominguez et al found that they could partially overcome this immunosuppression by co-delivering a novel ‘neoIL-2/IL15’ construct to overcome the ‘sink’ for IL-2 generated by Tregs. We will continue to highlight Tregs in this column over the next year.  

Mechanistic Case Reports and Short Series

The section in JITC that focuses on Case Reports will soon be renamed to allow emphasis on the need for deeper mechanistic understanding by informative case reports and series. Our hope is that this section will be an open portal for the earliest investigations in human of novel agents or older agents applied in new ways.  

It is headed up by Section Editor Sebastian Kobold, MD at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) (Germany). He is joined by Allison Betof, MD, PhD at Stanford Cancer Center (USA); Jack D. Bui, MD, PhD at the University of California San Diego (USA); Marco Donia, MD, PhD at the National Center for Cancer Immune Therapy (Denmark); and Heinz Läubli, MD, PhD at University Hospital Basel (Switzerland) as Associate Editors. Shown is a picture of when I visited Sebastian (right) and his extensive clinical and laboratory group.

This month, I would like to emphasize the importance of mechanistic case reports and short series as part of our mission for the Journal. Two case reports published in this issue are highlighted as well as two clinical short series within original research that we share with you for this month’s Digest. Here we focus on “what the study adds” and “insights” messaging from these recent articles themselves. I encourage you to peruse them and the other papers published in JITC this last month.