EiC Statement

My own research career began in the Department of Surgery, Cambridge University, UK in transplantation immunology, facing the problems of immunosuppression to prevent organ rejection and attempts to prevent this by tissue matching, pharmacological agents and immunological tolerance induction. Moving to hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for leukemia (in those days, simply bone marrow transplantation) not only exacerbated the challenge of tissue matching but also focused attention on the ability of the immune system to control cancer. From here, it was a short step to establishing in vitro models of anti-cancer immunity to understand the mechanisms involved in mediating anti-tumor immunity. With the advent of “T cell growth factor” (a.k.a. IL-2), it soon became clear that the prime anti-tumor immune effectors (T cells) could be maintained as clonal populations in vitro, with a view to enriching T cells with receptors specific for tumor antigens which could then be infused back into the patient. However, it also soon became clear that T cells could not expand indefinitely in culture, as had been known for well over a decade in the case of human fibroblasts (the “Hayflick Limit”). But immunologists were not aware of this…… I have belabored this point as just one illustration of many of scientists working in different fields being ignorant of each others´  work. Despite insistent calls over the years for interdisciplinary research, it has been my long-standing experience that overcoming the compartmentalization of different disciplines remains a major challenge in most fields, in particular when considering the marriage of clinical and biological research. In an effort to overcome this problem, I have led many multidisciplinary projects in the field of the biology of aging and in the field of cancer immunology – but attempts to combine both disciplines in a single project consistently failed to win funding.

This long-standing issue led me to work on the impact of immune ageing on the success of cancer vaccination and other immunotherapies, and the effects of age in general on cancer outcomes. Most clinical trials did not (and do not) specifically consider the effect of patient age on outcome and may even exclude older individuals, despite the fact that solid cancers are age-associated diseases. This provided the motivation to attempt to found a new journal because there were still very few or no journals specifically addressing research to help the older cancer patient (or even the older mouse....) - an important omission, even though some may think that we are already drowning in new journals. "Ageing and Cancer Research & Treatment" will try to fill that gap, and is dedicated to the promulgation of research addressing how ageing affects carcinogenesis and host-tumor interactions in humans and experimental models. Basic, translational and clinical cancer research from genes to molecules to tissues and organs in the context of ageing will be considered. The aim of the journal is to contribute to the better understanding of cancer in the aging host and to improved treatment of the older adult. I hope that readers and authors will agree with me that a specialist journal on cancer and ageing remains important, given the paucity of such specialist cover thus far. As founding EiC of ACRT, I would of course like to see the Journal develop into a trusted go-to source of information on all aspects of cancer in the aging context. We will perform due diligence in peer review of all submissions and aim to avoid any possibility of impropriety in everything we publish. All papers must conform to accepted standards of transparency and ethics, as in any rigorous scientific publication following the principles established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). We have now completed our first year of publication, with 10 papers available in the Open Access format. I look forward to ACRT making a seminal contribution to the knowledge base on this increasingly important topic, as global populations age and cancer in the older individual becomes ever more a public health concern worldwide.