Dear Colleagues,

T cell-based therapy has shown great potential as a more powerful approach to treating numerous diseases, including cancers and infectious and autoimmune disorders by harnessing the body's immune system. It is anticipated that responses initiated by immunotherapeutic interventions would explicitly uncover a venue of discerningly suppressing the individual disease while maintaining the rest of the immune system functionally active. Increasing knowledge in cellular immunology and the host immune response has led to the exciting development of diverse immunotherapeutic modalities, including the blockade of immune checkpoints, induction of activation of CD8⁺ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) or CD4⁺ regulatory T cells (T_regs), the use of non-specific immunosuppressive drugs with associated side effects (e.g., anti-CD3, CD20 or CD52 antibody), adoptive T-cell transfer (ACT)-based therapy, and modulation of the local environment including the tumor microenvironment (TME) and inflammatory microenvironment (IME) to facilitate T cell immunity (e.g., low-dose IL-2 treatment). Nevertheless, despite enormous advances in T cell-based therapy, the clinical efficacy and benefits remain less satisfactory due to a variety of factors that lessen anti-disease immunity, which include ex vivo T cell production, limited in vivo T cell expansion and persistence, auto antigen identification, generation of antigen-specific T cells, off-target complications, local environment, T cell trafficking to the local sites, etc. Effective strategies to bypassing these barriers should significantly improve T cell-based immunotherapy for various diseases and are thus urgently needed.

Prof. Dr. Jianxun Song
Guest Editor

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• virus
• T cell
• animal model
• mouse model
• immunotherapy
• viral latency
• cell metabolism
• immunomodulation
• exhaustion
• memory