Announcements
2 January 2019
Encyclopedia—the Scholarly Community Encyclopedia
5 November 2018
Blog │ Funders Push for a Full Transition to Open Access: Plan S
30 October 2018
Institutional Open Access Agreement between Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and MDPI
3 October 2018
2018 Nobel Prize in medicine awarded for pioneering research on immune checkpoints
This week, James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo were awarded the 2018 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation." As early as the 1990s, both immunologists discovered proteins that act as brakes on the T cells, ensuring the regulation that keeps autoreactive T cells in check.
Subsequent research found that blocking these so-called immune checkpoints through the use of checkpoint inhibitors shows promising results for cancer treatment, by ramping up the body's immune system and causing a stronger attack against tumor cells. In immunotherapy, doctors now have a viable alternative to chemotherapy and radiotherapy in treating some types of cancer, especially at advanced stages of infestation and including metastasis, even though instances of autoimmune reaction in immunotherapy are not yet fully understood.
Recent research has been looking into the potential of inhibitors blocking PD-1, the T cell protein discovered by Tasuku Honjo in 1992. A group at University of Calgary "investigated the ability for immune checkpoint blockade to enhance the efficacy of oncolytic reovirus (RV) for the treatment of breast cancer" (article published by Ahmed A. Mostafa et al. in Cancers). Simona De Rosa et al. investigated PD-L1/PD-1 expression in gastric cancer cells (article here). One group in Nice, France, studied the characteristics of lung adenocarcinomas in elderly patients in another article published in Cancers.
Diagram depicting the anticancer mechanism of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors
(Source: Figure 1 in S.M. Abdin et al., Cancers 2018,
doi:10.3390/cancers10020032).
In an article published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS), Xin Sun et al. give "some structural guidance" for the design of an antibody effective in blocking the PD-L1 immune suppressor. Shifaa M. Abdin et al. provide an overview of checkpoint inhibitors in their review paper entitled "Tackling Cancer Resistance by Immunotherapy: Updated Clinical Impact and Safety of PD-1/PD-L1 Inhibitors" (Figure 1 to the right).
In order to improve response rates in patients, targeting additional checkpoints such as LAG-3, BTLA or TIM-3 may prove effective, as discussed in an IJMS review paper by Robert J. Torphy et al. Other studies are looking into resistance mechanisms in tumor cells. Once these mechanisms are better understood, adjuvant treatments can help "improve the efficacy of immunotherapy and [...] expand its scope" (review paper by J. Rieth and S. Subramanian: "Mechanisms of Intrinsic Tumor Resistance to Immunotherapy").
One more recent review paper entitled "Tune Up In Situ Autovaccination against Solid Tumors with Oncolytic Viruses" (Teresa Nguyen et al.) lays out different strands of use of oncolytic viruses in cancer treatment, one of them being their combined use with checkpoint inhibitors.
A number of papers published in last year's Special Issue on "Targeting Immune Checkpoints and Immunotherapy" (guest-edited by Dr. William Chi-shing Cho) dealt with aspects of immunotherapy as well:
➤ "Targeting Immune Cell Checkpoints during Sepsis" (Naeem K. Patil et al.)
➤ "Synergies of Targeting Tumor Angiogenesis and Immune Checkpoints in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and Renal Cell Cancer: From Basic Concepts to Clinical Reality" (Andreas Pircher et al.)
➤ "PD-1/PD-L1 Blockade Therapy for Tumors with Downregulated MHC Class I Expression"
(Michal Šmahel)
➤ "Promising Targets for Cancer Immunotherapy: TLRs, RLRs, and STING-Mediated Innate Immune Pathways" (Kai Li et al.)
If you are interested to publish your research on related topics, we welcome your submission to the Special Issue on "Signaling Pathways and Immune Checkpoint Regulation in Cancer" (guest-edited by Prof. Dr. Georgios Rassidakis) in our oncology journal Cancers.
2 October 2018
MDPI Welcomes Plan S
Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.
We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.
3 September 2018
Meet Us at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Cancer Association in Osaka, Japan (27–29 September 2018)
30 August 2018
MDPI establishes Open Access agreement with Qatar National Library
We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.
Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.
Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".
For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at openaccess@qnl.qa.
3 July 2018
Meet Us at the ESMO 2018 Congress (19–23 October 2018) in Munich, Germany
31 May 2018
Antibodies 2017 CiteScore™ Announced - 2.85
We are pleased to report Antibodies received a CiteScore of 2.85 for 2017. The metric reflects citation activity in 2017 in Scopus for papers published in the period 2014‒2016.
For the full details in the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile. To check the full list of MDPI journals receiving CiteScores, please see here.
31 May 2018
2017 CiteScore™ Metrics Released
