Department of Medical Oncology, Qilu Hospital, Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University, Jinan 250012, Shandong, China
The world has witnessed the tremendous development of anticancer therapies over the past decades. Our tools to fight against this ancient enemy have evolved from traditional chemotherapy to targeted therapy, and then to immunotherapy now. Especially with the great success of immune checkpoint blockade therapies such as anti-PD-1 antibodies, we have taken a giant leap towards the future in which cancer will no longer be seen as an irreparable tragedy of life.
However, we are still far from winning the battle against cancer. The current therapeutic strategies are not close to the final answer of cancer treatment, with limited PFS and OS with almost all the treatments in the majority of the patients and types of cancer. The game is still in the hard mode. That is how I feel when I see the clinical trial results reporting a few more weeks’ prolonged survival time, and doctors all over the world excited about it. Fundamentally, our understanding of the biological processes of cancer is still limited, and new discoveries and ideas are urgently needed to make breakthroughs.
The age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years. The Earth was born roughly 4.5 billion years ago. The first life on Earth appeared about 3.8 billion years ago. The first cancer was found on the fossil of a turtle living nearly 230 million years ago. The first human found to have cancer lived about 1.7 million years ago. The first anticancer drug, nitrogen mustard, was approved 65 years ago. I feel lucky that I live in an era with rapid progress in cancer research and clinical practice, and act as both a doctor in medical oncology and a scientific worker in the field of cancer research to play a part in the fight against this familiar opponent. That’s why we launched the
JCD is an open-access, peer-reviewed and bilingual journal. Like other Luminescience journals, in addition to publishing in English, our professional editing team will also provide the readers with abstracts in Chinese, and the full text of some selected manuscripts will be published in both English and Chinese. We also welcome authors to provide us with the abstract in their native language after the article is accepted. Our aim is to enhance global communication in cancer research, and to let different voices from all over the world be heard. We hope and believe that JCD will be an outstanding journal in cancer research in the near future.