Omer Jamy ^1* Fuling Zhou ² Joshua Zeidner ³

• ¹ University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, United States
• ² Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
• ³ University of North Carolina Hospitals, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States

Harnessing the immune system to treat cancer was first described by Dr. William Coley in the 1890's after he developed a Streptococcal toxin to treat metastatic Sarcoma patients.(1) Dr. Coley's omniscience, however, did not translate clinically until almost a century later whereby immunotherapy approaches have led to a paradigm shift in the management of many solid tumors and hematologic malignancies. Allogeneic stem cell transplantation (alloSCT) has offered the ability to cure patients with high-risk hematologic malignancies via a known immunologic-based graft-versus-leukemia effect. Other immunotherapy approaches for hematologic malignancies have mainly been limited to B-cell neoplasms with bispecific T-cell engagers (BiTEs) for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells for ALL and lymphoma and immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICPIs) for lymphoma. (2) In the past decade, we have made significant progress in understanding the biology of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and ALL, including studying the underlying immune systems at play. (3) This has led to the investigation of innovative T-cell-based treatment strategies for these diseases. Within this context, we created this research topic to welcome studies on further understanding the immune landscape of AML and ALL, along with both pre-clinical and clinical data of immunotherapy in these settings and its implication in the real-world. A breakthrough in the treatment of AML has been the approval of venetoclax (VEN), a BCL-2 inhibitor. In conclusion, our topic highlights the keen interest of exploring the tumor immune microenvironment, in AML and ALL, to better understand disease biology, risk stratification and response to therapy. We also observe that these findings are being translated into clinical studies to treat challenging entities such as r/r AML and T-cell ALL, indicating the promising potential of immunotherapy in leukemia harking back to the clairvoyant observations by Dr. Coley over 130 years ago.