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Call for papers - Immunotherapy for infectious diseases

Guest Editors:
Michaël Desjardins: University of Montreal Hospital Center, Canada
Ofer Levy: Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, United States
Amy C. Sherman: Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, United States

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 28 June 2024


BMC Infectious Diseases is calling for submissions to our Collection on Immunotherapy for infectious diseases. This Collection aims to bring together groundbreaking research, innovative insights and transformative discoveries in the field of immunotherapy, offering a platform to explore the potential of this promising approach in combating infectious diseases.

Meet the Guest Editors

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Michaël Desjardins: University of Montreal Hospital Center, Canada

Dr Michaël Desjardins is a medical microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at the University of Montreal Hospital Center (CHUM) in Canada. He completed his residency at the University of Montreal in 2019 and pursued a two-year fellowship in transplant infectious diseases and clinical vaccinology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. His main areas of interest include the immunization of immunocompromised hosts. He is an active member of the Quebec Immunization Committee.

Ofer Levy: Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, United States

Dr Levy is currently Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School principal investigator, Associate Member at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, and staff physician in Pediatric Infectious Diseases. Dr. Levy is the Founder and Director of the BCH Precisions Vaccine Program (PVP), that enhances collaboration between academia, government, and industry to accelerate and de-risk development of adjuvanted vaccines tailored to vulnerable populations. He currently partners with PVP faculty to advance NIH/NIAID Human Immunology Project Consortium, Immune Development in Early Life (IDEAL) and Adjuvant Discovery and Development Program grant and contracts, leveraging systems biology as well as cutting edge robotic and immunologic approaches to discover, characterize, and formulate novel small molecule adjuvants tailored to enhance vaccine responses in vulnerable populations.

Amy C. Sherman: Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, United States

Amy Sherman, MD is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, an Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Division of Infectious Diseases, and a member of the Precision Vaccines Program (PVP) at Boston Children’s Hospital with a research focus in clinical and translational vaccinology and immunology for immunocompromised individuals.  Her clinical focus is in transplant and immunocompromised host infectious diseases.  She has served as a clinician researcher for various clinical studies, sponsors, and research groups, including NIH (DMID, DAIDS, DAIT, VRC), Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit (VTEU), HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), HIV Prevention Network (HPTN), and the Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC).  

About the Collection

BMC Infectious Diseases is calling for submissions to our Collection on Immunotherapy for infectious diseases. In recent years, the landscape of infectious diseases has witnessed dynamic changes, posing significant challenges to global health. Traditional antimicrobial therapies have been the cornerstone of infectious disease management for decades. However, the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens, and the continuous threat of emerging infectious agents necessitate novel therapeutic strategies to tackle these complex adversaries. Collaborations between immunologists, microbiologists, pharmacologists, and clinicians have uncovered innovative approaches, such as monoclonal antibodies, adoptive cell therapies, and immune checkpoint inhibitors, which have shown remarkable efficacy in certain infectious diseases. Furthermore, the intersection of immunotherapy and precision medicine has enabled personalized treatment strategies, tailored to an individual's immune profile and pathogen characteristics. By continuing this research trajectory, we can envision a future where immunotherapies revolutionize infectious disease management, with highly targeted and potent interventions that minimize collateral damage to host tissues, prevent relapses, and offer long-lasting protection.

BMC Infectious Diseases is now accepting submissions to a Collection on immunotherapy for infectious diseases. This Collection aims to bring together groundbreaking research, innovative insights and transformative discoveries in the field of immunotherapy, offering a platform to explore the potential of this promising approach in combating infectious diseases.

This collection aims to cover a wide range of infectious diseases and therapeutic modalities, including but not limited to:

  • Immunotherapy for viral infections
  • Targeting the immune system in bacterial infections
  • Novel therapeutic strategies for fungal infections
  • Immunotherapeutic approaches to combat parasitic diseases
  • Immune modulation for symptom alleviation in infectious diseases
  • Therapeutic antibodies in immunotherapy for infectious diseases
  • Enhancing pathogen elimination through immunotherapy
  • Immunotherapeutic interventions for drug-resistant pathogens
  • Immune checkpoint inhibitors as a novel approach in infectious disease treatment
  • Immunotherapy for emerging and reemerging infectious diseases 


Image credit: iLexx / Getty images / iStock

  1. Immunosuppression is a leading cause of septic death. Therefore, it is necessary to search for biomarkers that can evaluate the immune status of patients with sepsis. We assessed the diagnostic and prognostic ...

    Authors: Juanjuan Cui, Wen Cai, Jing Lin, Li Zhang, Youhan Miao, Ying Xu and Weifeng Zhao
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2024 24:399
    Content type: Research Published on:

  2. Human polyomaviruses contribute to human oncogenesis through persistent infections, but currently there is no effective preventive measure against the malignancies caused by this virus. Therefore, the developm...

    Authors: Reza Salahlou, Safar Farajnia, Nasrin Bargahi, Nasim Bakhtiyari, Faranak Elmi, Mehdi Shahgolzari, Steven Fiering and Srividhya Venkataraman
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2024 24:177
    Content type: Research Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of original Research Articles. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read our submission guidelines to confirm that type is accepted by the journal. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Immunotherapy for infectious diseases" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.