Welcome to the <i>Journal of Innate Immunity</i>

tablished a strong editorial board consisting of experts in most aspects of innate immunity. Their expertise and continuing commitment will serve to guarantee the high quality of the journal. It would not have been possible to start a new journal without professional help from Karger, and we are indebted to many people there, in particular Thomas Nold, Daniel Hangartner, Dagmar Horn and Ruedi Jappert, for their help and patience, as well as their efficiency and instant decision making. We are impressed that Karger has been able to launch a new journal within such a short period of time. Finally, we would like to thank all the authors for contributing their articles, which reflect their creativity and hard work. In order to establish and sustain a journal of high quality for a broad audience, we are critically dependent on future submissions of first-class manuscripts from the scientific community. With these remarks, we would like to welcome our readership to an exciting tour of inspection through the Journal of Innate Immunity . We hope that you will find it a stimulating and thought-provoking read. We also hope that you will share our vision for the future of the Journal of Innate Immunity and that it will continue to publish the results of frontier research and will provide an important forum for the exchange of ideas in the field of innate immunity. Heiko Herwald, Lund Arne Egesten, Lund We have during the past decade witnessed a major change in our understanding of immunology. It is now evident that the importance of the innate immune system has been underestimated for a remarkably long time. Early on, pioneers in the field of immunology, not least Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov and Paul Ehrlich, described key events in host defense that are now considered part of innate immunity. In 1989, Charles A. Janeway predicted the existence of pattern recognition receptors that mediate the human body’s ability to recognize microorganisms. This was a landmark that boosted the interest of the scientific community in innate immunity. Innate immunity is perhaps the most exciting area of immunologic research today, and this is reflected by the rapidly increasing number of publications within the field. Despite this, a dedicated platform for sharing and discussing new information with a broad readership has not been available until now. The need for a journal specializing in innate immunity occurred to us some years ago. The idea of launching such a journal ourselves first became feasible in the summer of 2007, when we approached Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers with our initial concept. The project was met with enthusiasm and in October 2007 we had a first meeting with Thomas Nold, Product Manager at Karger. Just twelve months have passed since this meeting, and we are now proud to release the first issue of the Journal of Innate Immunity . The strain and stress of the last few months have been wiped away by the positive response from our colleagues. With their help we have esPublished online: July 8, 2008 Journal of Innate Immunity