The tremendous progress that has been made in the diagnosis and treatment of many forms of cancer should be celebrated. However, the scourge of cancer remains a major health care challenge worldwide. Cancer is a difficult and expensive disease to treat, oftentimes bankrupting families and traumatizing everyone it touches. Even patients who have achieved remission fear recurrence and metastasis. We believe it is unrealistic to address the challenges of global cancer control simply by improving treatments for advanced disease; prevention of cancer must play a major role.
Lung cancer provides an instructive example. Until recently, a diagnosis of metastatic lung cancer was a virtual death sentence. Thanks to the recent development of immunotherapies, certain patients now have improved outcomes, although even with these new treatments, only a low percentage will experience long-term survival. It must not be forgotten that effective tobacco control has the potential to save more lives by preventing lung cancer than advanced therapies do by treating it. Unfortunately, measures to limit tobacco use are imperfect and fraught with political obstructions. Furthermore, there remain major gaps in knowledge regarding lung cancer etiology among never-smokers. Thus, the challenge of lung cancer requires concerted research regarding treatment, screening, effective application of existing knowledge concerning prevention, and further advances in the basic science concerning mechanisms of carcinogenesis.
In other words, lowering the burden of lung and other cancers requires risk reduction measures, which may involve lifestyle changes and/or pharmaceutical interventions. We are also cognizant of the possibility of “cancer interception,” which refers to interventions that block the progression of early-stage cancer to aggressive disease. Since its beginnings in 2008, Cancer Prevention Research has focused on all these areas.
As we take over editorship of the journal from Scott Lippman, its founding editor, our vision is to advance the field by providing an authoritative forum for peer-reviewed publication of high-quality research. As is the case with all AACR journals, we intend that the caliber of the content will make it an essential resource for workers in the field, and we also hope that it will demonstrate to academics in other areas and policymakers in government and the private sector (particularly the insurance and pharmaceutical industries) the important contribution cancer prevention must play in the challenge of global cancer control.
With the burden of cancer increasing worldwide, it is imperative to maximize cancer prevention and interception efforts. Particularly in developing countries, only by advancing prevention can we avoid overburdening medical facilities that treat patients who have advanced malignancy. Curing a cancer represents an amazing scientific, medical, and personal triumph. Yet cancer patients, even those who currently can be cured, would rather have had their disease prevented, had that been possible.
Promising frontiers in cancer research include immunologic approaches to risk reduction; the use of “big data” to identify previously unrecognized modifiable risk factors; the use of genetic profiles to personalize risk reduction so that specific interventions are applied to those people most likely to benefit; and exploration of modifiable variations in the microbiome in relation to cancer risk.
A refreshed subject classification list for Cancer Prevention Research will include biology of cancer risk, prevention, and interception; genetic determinants of risk; optimization of screening strategies; tobacco control; infectious causes of cancer; inflammation and risk; lifestyle, obesity, and diet in relation to risk; and public health policy related to cancer prevention. Mapping the pathways from normal to premalignant disease to cancer will be essential to identify molecular targets for novel prevention strategies.
Cancer Prevention Research will publish solicited and unsolicited high-quality reviews, regular research articles, and research briefs—a category designed for rapid publication of short reports of exceptional importance.
We would like to thank the AACR, the journal's founding editor Scott Lippman, the outstanding scientific editorial team working on the journal, the AACR staff managing the journal, and the peer reviewers for their diligence and confidence in the journal. We invite contributions not only from the traditional cancer prevention research community, but also from medical subspecialists working in clinically relevant areas of organ-specific cancer risk reduction, as well as scientists in any field whose work has relevance to cancer prevention.
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