Immunogenetics and Personalized Therapy

Dear colleagues,

Background:

Allogeneic transplantation has been in practice as a personalized therapy for 30 years. Advances in immunogenetics over those three decades has directly contributed to improvements in outcomes.  The field of cell and gene therapy is undergoing a transition with hundreds of new therapies on the verge of clinical delivery. What are the immunogenetics challenges today and how will we face them in order to more effectively deliver these new therapies in a personalized way?

Aim and scope:

This issue will focus on personalized therapy that involves immunogenetics and considers the unique characteristics of the patient and or the cell/gene/molecule being therapeutically administered.

History:

Bone marrow transplant is possibly the oldest and most extreme form of personalized therapy where a single individual provides a product to treat a single individual. This one-to-one model also exists in solid organ transplantation. Better matching, typically based on deep sequencing of the immune genes, leads to better outcomes. Some immunogenetic systems (IG, KIR) have proven impossible to sequence at cohort scale until methods based on long read sequences have started to appear as recently as this year (2020).

Cutting-edge researches:

New assays, new computational techniques, new therapies, new models for interpreting the polymorphisms of the immune genes (HLA, KIR, IG) or their products (T-Cell Repertoire, B-Cell Repertoire) are also welcome.

What kind of paper we are looking for:

• Application of immunogenomic data to fields inside and outside of immunology, bone marrow transplant, and histocompatibility
• The role of the polymorphic HLA system on the development of personalized therapies
• Practical challenges on the path to clinical use of personalized therapies
• The role of data, and specifically data science in the development of these therapies
• Banked allogeneic therapeutic products (anti-viral T-Cells, iPS) how to optimally meet the need for personalized products
• The role of HLA and KIR in drug responses, allergies and response to vaccines or therapeutics

Director Martin Maiers
Guest Editor

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• immunogenetics
• human leukocyte antigens (HLA)
• killer immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIR)
• bioinformatics
• machine learning
• histocompatibility
• cellular therapy