Blood Research: hematology and beyond

which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This issue marks the change of the Korean Journal of Hematology (KJH) to Blood Research. This change reflects the rapid ongoing changes in the science, medicine and hematology. It was not long ago when hematology involved only the study and treatment red blood cell, platelet, granulocyte, monocyte and lymphocyte disorders and was focused on anemia, hemoglobinopathies, transfusion, coa-gulation, leukemia and lymphomas. Most of us who are trained or are interested in hematology are now working in a much border field. In fact, the artificial boundaries that were once used to define many fields of medicine such as hematology are disappearing. Advances in the understanding of hematopoietic stem cells, immunology and histocompatibility led to the birth and rapid growth and advancement of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation. HSC transplants involving HLA-compatible siblings and unrelated subjects are now routinely preformed worldwide. Further understanding of transplant biology and immunology led to the realization that the graft-versus-tumor immune responses are very important to the successful treatment of leukemia by transplantation. HSC grafts can now be processed to isolate CD34+ cells while leaving precise quantities of CD3+ cells to reduce the incidence of graft-versus-host disease while retaining graft-versus-tumor effects. Immunotherapy is, in fact, becoming an important part of HSC transplantation. Clinical investigators are now testing the use of leukemia specific T cells to prevent disease relapse following trans-plantation and viral specific T cells to treat post-transplant infections. The growing field of immunotherapy of cancer is becoming similar in many ways to HSC transplantation [1]. Many cancer immunotherapy protocols that make use of adoptive T cell therapy now include pre-therapy leukor-eduction to reduce the levels of circulating T regulatory cells and to increase levels of serum cytokines which enhance the survival of the transfused T cells and to improve clinical outcomes. Some protocols are even combining pre-treatment leukoreduction chemotherapy with total body irradiation and autologous CD34+ cell rescue to further improve clinical outcomes [2]. Clinical investigators are now also using genetically engineered T cells expressing anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) to treat B-cell leukemias and lymphomas and other types of CAR T cells are being developed to treat cancers. Autologous T cells engineered to express high affinity T cell receptors directed to tumor antigens and cancer testis antigens such as NY-ESO-1 are also being used to treat many …