Inside Blood: a roadmap to the best and brightest

Beginning with this issue, the Editors have instituted a new journal segment designed to provide the readership a guide to particularly interesting papers in the clinical and basic sciences. From each issue the editors will select a handful of exemplary papers and recruit short commentaries from noted experts in the corresponding fields. In this way it is hoped that each InsideBlood summary will enlighten our entire readership. By highlighting the significance of particularly important papers in the basic aspects of the hematologic and oncologic sciences, and by illustrating their likely therapeutic applications or implications for the present state of clinical care, we hope to provide our clinically oriented readers a vision of the scientific basis of future medical care. In a similar attempt to widen the mutual appreciation and understanding of the clinical and basic sciences, clinical studies that could impact pressing questions of molecular mechanisms of hematologic physiology or oncologic pathophysiology will be summarized, in order to attract the interest and provoke the inquisitiveness of our more investigative colleagues.

For example, in this issue's Inside Blood, a paper on the identification of mutations in congenital amegakaryocytic thrombocytopenia is discussed in terms that extend beyond the recognition of a cause for an inherited hematologic disease: the role of the thrombopoietin receptor in stem cell biology is confirmed, the possibility of stem cell exhaustion is raised, and the mutations themselves provide insights into the structure-function relationships of a cytokine receptor. In a similar way, brief summaries of papers identifying a soluble form of the γ_C receptor (a shared component of the IL-2, IL-4, IL-7, IL-9, and IL-15 receptors) and of the successful use of a thymidine kinase suicide gene for the targeted elimination of donor lymphocyte infusion-induced graft-versus-host disease explore implications for all of hematology and oncology.

We sincerely hope that Inside Blood will enhance readers' enjoyment and advance their understanding of what is inside the pages of Blood.