Dear Colleagues,

The year 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of Pathogens. We would like to express our sincerest thanks to our readers, innumerable authors, anonymous peer reviewers, editors, and all the people working in one way or another for the journal, who have made substantial contributions over the years. We are delighted and proud to celebrate this milestone with a series of Special Issues and events.

To mark this important milestone, a Special Issue entitled “10th Anniversary of Pathogens—T Cells in Pathogenic Infections” will be launched as a part of this celebration.

T cells play a central role in the immune response against pathogenic infections, and T cell-based therapy has shown significant potential as a more powerful approach for treating various pathogenic diseases by harnessing the body's immune system. It is anticipated that responses initiated by immunotherapeutic interventions would explicitly uncover a revenue 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 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 local environment, including the tumor microenvironment (TME) and inflammatory microenvironment (IME) to facilitate T cell immunity (e.g., low-dose IL-2 treatment). However, despite enormous advances in the T cell-based therapy, the clinical efficacy and benefits remain less satisfactory due to a variety of factors that lessen antiviral 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 for bypassing these barriers should significantly improve T cell-based immunotherapy for pathogenic diseases, and thus are urgently needed.

Prof. Dr. Jianxun Song
Guest Editor

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• pathogen
• T cell
• immunotherapy
• persistence
• cell metabolism
• immunomodulation
• exhaustion
• memory
• animal model