Immunogenetics today: HLA, MHC and much more - Editorial overview

A scientific success of the second half of the 20th century, from discovery to complete mapping and full DNA sequencing, MHC/HLA immunogenetics is facing new exciting challenges that this collection of reviews intends to identify. It alms to provide a view of the development of the field in science and physiology with particular focus on translation to medicine. The MHC/ HLA complex is the most polymorphic genetic region with important biological function (i.e. immune responses, development and regulation) and medical impact. The human MHC is associated with more diseases than any region of the genome particularly related to infection and autoimmunity. Even more spectacular is the role of the HLA system in organ and haematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and its importance in the development of vaccines, particularly cancer vaccines, is well recognized. Today, the field of HLA encompasses the most sophisticated fundamental scientific approaches as well as every day clinical laboratory medical practice. Because of the unique genetic diversity and variability of HLA within different populations of the world the need for international collaboration was recognized very early on. Over 40 years ago, the International Histocompatibility Workshops launched a new paradigm on how modern biomedical science should to be organized and translated. Only such a combined approach enabled the collective sharing of data, revealing the extent of HLA diversity, which is best illustrated by HLA nomenclature which contains over 2000 alleles [1]. This mode of international cooperation initially developed for HLA has subsequently been adopted for many other large-scale genomic studies, and has been used more recently to tackle the major challenge of understanding multifactorial diseases. The following series of articles highlights several critical checkpoints of MHC and non-MHC immunogenetics, which should be considered as an attempt to provide a more integrated view of these systems with respect to genetics, evolution, immune physiology and medical translation.