ecancer Founding Editor, Kings College London, UK and FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology (IFOM), Milan, Italy
Correspondence to: gordon.mcvie@kcl.ac.uk
When the sadly deceased Umberto Veronesi and I first set up ecancer, our mantra was that “knowledge should be free”. We were determined to break down barriers in cancer communication, whether they were geographical, financial or linguistic. Ten years on we have supported over 3000 authors to publish for free, and every word on the entire website is free to read. Umberto sadly died a year ago, just as we reached 15 million visits from 196 countries—a ringing endorsement of the demand for free, high quality information and education.
Our celebratory special issue reflects the wide variety of ecancermedicalscience papers published over the past ten years, and in particular the geographic heterogeneity of origin which is something of which we are particularly proud. One of the main reasons for this is that we have always offered free publication to those who don’t have funding to publish their research in an open access journal.
Another important factor is that authors can submit in Spanish; their articles are peer reviewed by Spanish speaking reviewers, and then, if accepted, are translated and published for free. We also offer a copyediting service at no cost to authors, which is of course particularly helpful to those clinicians and scientists who have English as a second language.
The special issue opens with an extremely important study from Maria Pombo-de-Oliveira (INCA, Brazil), which involved 80% of all infants in Brazil with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). The study looked at which particular genetic rearrangements were common to these children and found that they include an assortment of inherited predisposition genes. Biometric details about the parents of these children were also gathered and the article details a whole host of epidemiological factors which are at play. The most significant of these is exposure of pregnant women to pesticides like DDT, and the article demonstrates clear interaction between this environmental poison and the predisposing genes which the infants display in utero and early weeks of life.
The second paper is by Fayed et al, and is the result of a public health study on the need for regional guidelines for breast cancer management in the MENA region (the Middle East and Northern Africa). There is an urgent requirement for recommendations on how to give breast cancer patients the best care when there is a shortage of facilities, and the authors set out their rationale for what measures would make the most difference: clinical trials designed to improve cost effectiveness, new methods to share and improve facilities, and increasing the awareness of the breast cancer problem in order to create fundraising projects to support breast cancer patients in low-resource settings.
The last decade has also been a significant one for radiation therapy, and the next three articles all cover this topic from different angles. The first is from Luis Pinillos et al (Oncosalud, Lima, Peru), and it documents the history of the development of radiotherapy in Latin America from the beginning. The article includes data on the sometimes slow and patchy uptake of best practice in radiation therapy in the region as well as information regarding professional facilities and equipment in selected Latin American countries.
The next article comes from the European Institute of Oncology, Milan (IEO), where ecancer was conceived ten years ago under the direction of Umberto Veronesi and myself. Prof Barbara Jerecek-Fossa’s team have reviewed the technical advances in radiotherapy, pointing out that it hadn’t moved along much until the last decade and then documenting all the latest treatments which now abound in this field due to rapid technological development, such as IMRT, stereotactic body radiation therapy and new imaging techniques.
The specific possibilities of better local control are extremely well highlighted by Cristina Garibaldi et al (also based at the European Institute of Oncology), who take prostate cancer as an example of what can be done in terms of cytoreduction in patients who have already got oligometastatic disease. The article documents a series of 20 plus patients who have achieved long term survival after having cytoreductive radiation applied directly to the prostate, while receiving systemic therapy directed at their metastases. This could be an important new strategy for such patients and it needs to be developed over the next few years.
The final article is on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the treatment of which has been a medical triumph over the last decade. Luca Toschi et al, from Istituto Clinico Humanitas, Milan, review the most clinically relevant advances in the diagnosis and treatment of NSCLC, thanks to the genomic revolution, and identification of rogue genes, epigenes and DNA repair defects. They discuss future developments in targeted imaging and therapeutics in this exciting field, while emphasizing the risk of added toxicity and financial burden. And it goes without saying that early diagnostic imaging and “liquid biopsies” have made surgical cure a reality for heavy smokers.
ecancer has come a long way in ten years – our methodology is better now, we’re quicker at getting the latest news, expert opinion and published research online and we are still free. And now the two biggest funders of biomedical research, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation plus the Wellcome Trust, have announced that all the research they fund must be published in Open Access journals. This is a great endorsement of our strategy and we remain staunch believers in the power of open access to advance the education of doctors and scientists, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.
I’d like to thank all our supporters, peer reviewers and a very hard working Editorial Board, without whom none of this would have been possible, and we all look forward to the next ten years with great enthusiasm.
