Letter from the Editor

This issue is the eleventh of the Immunological Investigations’ thematic issues, and is entitled, “Current Issues in Transplantation Immunology”. Drs. Oleh Pankewycz and Nader Nader are the guest editors of this issue and have provided a brief review article on this topic and invited a selection of additional authors for this issue. This topic was chosen to highlight the importance of transplantation and its impact on health and health care.

Since 2012, nine articles which discuss transplantation were published in Immunological Investigations, these include:

Study of the relationships between IL-23R, IL-17, IL-21 polymorphisms and serum level of IL-17, IL-21 with acute graft rejection in Iranian liver transplant recipients, (Karimi et al., 2014),

The interference of monoclonal antibodies with laboratory diagnosis: clinical and diagnostic implications (Ostrov & Amsterdam, 2013),

Inhibition of accelerated rejection mediated by alloreactive CD4⁺ memory T cells and prolonged allograft survival by arsenic trioxide (Yan et al., 2013),

Association between a TGFBR2 Gene Polymorphism (rs2228048, Asn389Asn) and Acute Rejection in Korean Kidney Transplantation Recipients (Kim et al., 2013),

Reconstitution and Phenotype of Tregs in CMV Reactivating Patients Following Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation (Velaga et al., 2013),

Evaluation of a Cryopreservation Procedure to Set Up a New Bone Marrow Transplant Unit Using Lymphocyte Proliferation Test(Wong et al., 2012),

HLA-C matching status does not affect rituximab-mediated antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity by allogeneic natural killer Cells.(Machino et al., 2012)

Diversity of HLA-B 35 alleles and haplotypes among Croatians (Calusic et al., 2012)

HLA class I and II polymorphisms in the Gujjar population from Pakistan (Raza et al., 2013)

These papers have whet our appetite for understanding the current clinical state of the art for transplantation. In addition, several manuscripts focusing on immunosuppression have been published recently in Immunological Investigations, and authors with an interest in transplantation may also find the following papers to be of interest:

Immunosuppressive activity of florfenicol on the immune responses in mice (Shuang et al., 2011), Protection against cyclophosphamide-induced myelosuppression by ZPDC glycoprotein (24 kDa) (Lee & Lim 2013),

Combined 4-1BB and CD28 costimulation could unleash lymphocytes from immunosuppression induced by adipose derived stem cell soluble products (Habibagahi et al., 2013),

Amniotic membrane is an immunosuppressor of peripheral blood mononuclear cells, (Garfias et al., 2011),

and

Mesenchymal stem cell-mediated immature dendritic cells induce regulatory T cell-based immunosuppressive effect (Choi et al., 2012).

The guest editors, Dr. Oleh Pankewycz, M.D., Associate Professor and Medical Director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program, Department of Medicine, Division of Transplantation at The State University of New York, University at Buffalo,(photo left) and Dr. Nader Nader Professor of Anesthesiology and Research Professor of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences have worked well together to create this informative issue.

Pankewycz, the lead guest editor, has had a long term interest transplantation. He received his M.D. from Columbia in 1980, did an internal medicine residency at Billings Hospital, University of Chicago and his clinical fellowship in Nephrology at New England Medical Center, Tufts University. His post-doctoral fellowship experience included training in the laboratory of Michael Madaio (Tufts) on the Mechanisms of Systemic Lupus Nephritis and the laboratory of Terry B. Strom and Vickie Kelly, Beth Israel Hospital, at Harvard on transplantation immunology. He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Internal Medicine, Nephrology and is a UNOS accredited Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Physician. He has produced 62 research articles on transplantation, which range from basic science to clinical outcome analyses. He is involved in service for the American Society of Nephrology, the American Transplant Congress, and the American Society of Nephrology. He has also been the site principle investigator of many drug trails for transplantation.

Dr. Nader Nader is on the editorial board of Immunologic Investigations. He received his MD from Tabriz University in Iran, performed a cardiac surgery residency and an anesthesia residency. He is now Program Director of the Cardiac Anesthesia Fellowship at the University at Buffalo and Vice-Chari of the Department of Anesthesia. He also completed a Ph.D in Microbiology at the University at Buffalo. He has won the Outstanding Teacher Award 4 times and his skill as a teacher and mentor is also seen in the fact that he has acted as an advisor to numerous students at all levels: graduate, post-doctoral, residents, fellows and undergraduates. He has had a long term interest in inflammation and injury associated with aspiration during surgery. His interest spread to understanding and reduction of kidney, heart and other damage in relation to surgical events. With this focus, Nader realized the numerous changes in transplantation medicine, and he suggested this topic for the thematic.

These talented guest editors have been wonderful to work with and have invited an outstanding group of scientists to showcase for Immunological Investigations the current state of the art in transplantation. I am sure that you will enjoy the summary by Panckewycz,et al. (2014) and the very exciting and thought-provoking articles on this theme. The subthemes covered in this issue are HLA matching, Alloantibodies, Immunosuppression and Basic Transplantation Immunology. The articles are as follows:

HLA matching:

Rey, D., G. Vargas-Alarcon, C. Areces, M. Enriquez-de-Salamanca, S. Abd-El-Fatah-Khalil, M. Fernandez-Honrado, M. Javier, J.M. Martin-Villa, and A. Arnaiz-Villena. 2014. “Mixtec mexican amerindians: An HLA alleles study for america peopling, pharmacogenomics and transplantation.”

Alloantibodies:

Maguire, O., Tario Jr. J.D., T.C. Shanahan, P.K. Wallace, and H. Minderman. 2014. “Flow cytometry and solid organ transplantation: a perfect match.”

Pankewycz, O, K. Soliman, and MR. Laftavi. 2014. “The increasing clincal importance of alloantibodies in kidney transplantation.”

Immunosuppression:

Laftavi, MR., R. Sharma, L. Feng, M. Said, and O. Pankewycz. 2014. “Induction therapy in renal transplant recipients: A review.”

Brar, JE, and ND Nader. 2014. “Immune minimization strategies in renal transplantation.”

Soliman, K., E Mogadam, M. Laftavi, S. Patel, L. Feng, M. Said, and O Pankewycz. 2014. “Long-term outcomes following sirolimus conversion after renal transplantation.” Immunological Investigations.

and

Basic transplantation immunology:

Ebrahimi, A, and F Rahim. 2014. “Recent immunomodulatory strategies in transplantation.”

Hu, K, H Zhou, G Zheng, G. Wang, Y Fu, and Y Jiang. 2014. “Imbalance of different types of CD4+FoxP3+ T cells in renal transplant recipients.”

Manjili, MH, and AA Toor. 2014. “Etiology of GVHD: alloreactivity or impaired cellular adaptation?”

Kumar, V, and A Kumar. 2014. “Immunological aspects of corneal transplantation.

I hope that you enjoy this issue, the 11th thematic, which coincides with my 11th anniversary as editor of Immunologic Investigations. Certain milestones for Immunological Investigations are worth celebrating. This year our impact factor increased to 1.903 from last year's 1.731. Important articles appearing last year have received a large number of downloads already, 7 of the top 10 downloaded 2013 articles have already been downloaded over 100 times, the remaining have been downloaded over 80 times. The 2013 top 10 are:

The role of cytokines in inflammatory bone loss (Souza & Lerner, 2013) (downloaded 429 times)

Current Trends and Investigative Developments in Celiac Disease (Samasca et al., 2013)

Age-Associated Changes in MicroRNA Expression in Bone Marrow Derived Dendritic Cells (Park et al., 2013)

Inflammatory Processes in Complex Regional Pain Syndromes (Hauser et al., 2013)

CD8+ T Cell Exhaustion During Persistent Viral Infection is Regulated Independently of the Virus-Specific T Cell Receptor (Jackson et al., 2013)

Biomarkers of Lung Injury in Critical Care Medicine: Past, Present, and Future (Tunceroglu et al., 2013)

The role of sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) and lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) in regulation of osteoclastic and osteoblastic cells (Dziak, 2013)

Measurement of Suppressor Activity of T CD4+CD25+ T Reg Cells Using Bromodeoxyuridine Incorporation Assay (Ávalos-Martínez, et al., 2013)

IL-17 Gene Polymorphism Is Associated with Chronic Periodontitis and Peri-implantitis in Iranian Patients: A Cross-Sectional Study (Kadkhodazadeh et al., 2013)

IL4 and IFNalpha generation of dendritic cells reveals great migratory potential and NFkB and cJun expression in IL4DCs (de Azevedo et al., 2013).

In addition, popular articles in 2014 include:

A pandemic H1N1 influenza virus-like particle vaccine induces cross-protection in mice (Inn et al., 2014)

Dicer in immune cell development and function (Devasthanam & Tomasi, 2014)

Antinuclear antibodies: two-step detection strategy (Callado et al., 2014)

Generation and characterization of a rat monoclonal antibody against the RNA polymerase protein from Dengue Virus-2 (García-Cordero et al., 2014)

Study of TLR4 and IL-8 Gene Polymorphisms in H. pylori-Induced Inflammation in Gastric Cancer in an Ethnic Kashmiri Population (Qadri et al., 2014).

TGF-β favors bone marrow-derived dendritic cells to acquire tolerogenic properties (Song et al., 2014).

Fluctuations in pathogenic CD4+ T-cell subsets in a murine sclerodermatous model of chronic graft-versus-host disease (Lim et al., 2014).

In silico analysis of potential human T Cell antigens from Mycobacterium tuberculosis for the development of subunit vaccines against tuberculosis (Devasundaram et al., 2014).

Synergistic effects of atorvastatin and all-trans retinoic acid in ameliorating animal model of multiple sclerosis (Abtahi Froushani et al., 2014).

Combination of cancer immunotherapy with clinically available drugs that can block immunosuppressive cells (Kim et al., 2014).

I would like to thank Dr. Ernesto DeNardin for helping in all problem areas as associate editor, Drs. Oleh Panckewicz and Nader Nader for working so hard on the thematic issue and the editorial board for helping to review 153 papers in the last year with ∼44% (67/153) acceptance rate.

Regards,

Kate Rittenhouse-Olson

Editor