Editorial introductions

Abstract

Current Opinion in Oncology was launched in 1989. It is one of a successful series of review journals whose unique format is designed to provide a systematic and critical assessment of the literature as presented in the many primary journals. The field of psychiatry is divided into 15 sections that are reviewed once a year. Each section is assigned a Section Editor, a leading authority in the area, who identifies the most important topics at that time. Here we are pleased to introduce the Journal's Editor and Section Editors for this issue. EDITOR Jean A. KlasterskyJean A. KlasterskyJean A. Klastersky was born March 3, 1940, in Prague. Professor Klastersky was Head of the Department of Medicine at the Institut Jules Bordet in Brussels, Belgium, and Professor of Medicine, Medical Oncology and Physical Diagnosis at the Université Libre de Bruxelles from 1977. He retired from these positions in 2005. Currently, he is the Coordinator of the “Programme des Soins Oncologiques” for the Public Hospitals in Brussels and Consultant in medical oncology at the Institut Jules Bordet. Professor Klastersky was an intem and resident at the University Hospitals of the Université Libre de Bruxelles between 1962 and 1965, where he gained his MD (Docteur en Médecine, Chirurgie et Accouchements). From 1967 to 1968, he was Chief-Resident at Boston City Hospital and then a Research Fellow and Assistant in Medicine at Thorndike Memorial Laboratory Harvard Medical School. He became Chief of the Section of Infectious Diseases at the Institut Jules Bordet in 1970, before taking up the position of Head of the Department of Medicine in 1977. Professor Klastersky was a founder member of the European Lung cancer Working Party and has been his President since 1978 until 2003. He was President (and founder member) of the International EORTC Antimicrobial Therapy Project Group between 1979 and 1987 and the Group's Secretary General from 1987 to 2000. He was President (and founder member) of the Multinational Association for Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC) from 1990 to 2000. He has been Visiting Professor of Medical Oncology at the Charles University in Prague, since 1994. Professor Klastersky is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Association of Cancer Research, the European Society of Medical Oncology, the American Society of Microbiology, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer, the “Royale Académie de Médecine” of Belgium and various other international and national medical and/or oncological societies. Professor Klastersky is the author of over 400 original articles, nearly 400 review articles and 17 scientific books. He is the Editor of Current Opinion in Oncology. SECTION EDITORS Julie Ann SosaJulie Ann SosaJulie Ann Sosa, MD MA FACS is Professor of Surgery and Medicine at Duke University, USA, where she serves as Chief of Endocrine Surgery and Director of the Surgical Center for Outcomes Research and Leader of the Endocrine Neoplasia Diseases Group at the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Her clinical interest is in endocrine surgery, with a focus in thyroid cancer. She is the author of more than 240 peer-reviewed publications in outcomes analysis, cost-effectiveness/decision analysis, meta-analysis, and survey-based methodologies, as well as stem cell research. She has been a PI or investigator in a number of clinical trials for advanced thyroid cancer. She is Treasurer-elect of the American Thyroid Association (ATA) and serves on the Board of Directors of the ATA and Executive Council of the Society for Surgical Oncology. She serves on practice guidelines task forces on hyperthyroidism and thyroid nodules and differentiated thyroid cancer for the ATA, and on neuroendocrine tumors for the NCCN. She serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of Surgery, Annals of Surgical Oncology, Surgery, Endocrine, Hormones and Cancer, Journal of Thyroid Research and the International Journal of Endocrine Oncology, and is Deputy Editor of JAMA-Surgery and Associate Editor of the World Journal of Surgery and the Journal of Surgical Research. She is also editor of the endocrine tumors section of Current Opinion in Oncology. Dr Sosa was born in Montreal and raised in upstate New York. She received her AB at Princeton, USA, her MA at Oxford, UK, and her MD at Johns Hopkins, USA where she also completed the Halsted residency and a fellowship. Pierre HainautPierre HainautPierre Hainaut was born and educated in Belgium. He obtained an Msc in Science in 1980 and a PhD in Biological Sciences in 1987 from the University of Liège. From 1987 to 1994, he has been held postdoctoral positions in France (INSERM) and in the UK (University of Cambridge, University of York). Most of his laboratory research was focused on molecular genetics, particularly on the tumour suppressor protein p53. He joined IARC as staff scientist in 1995 where he became head of Molecular Carcinogenesis in 1999. He is an internationally recognized scientist in the p53 mutation field and hasled the development of the IARC TP53 database. His research has a focus on the molecular pathogenesis of cancers in low- and middle-resource countries, namely on tumours of the upper-aerodigestive tract (squamous cell carcinoma of the oesophagus in Iran, Kenya, Latin America; lung cancers) and on HepatoCellular Carcinoma (West Africa, Colombia, Egypt, Thailand, China). From 2002 to 2008, he has led the Gambia Hepatitis Intervention Study (GHIS), a large intervention trial aimed at testing the long-term efficacy of newborn HB vaccine against liver cancer in adults in West Africa. Since 2005 he has contributed to developing evidence-based standards for biobanks. Pierre Hainaut is frequently lecturing and giving courses in Post-Graduate programs in different countries and in international summer schools. He has written about 375 articles and book chapters and is the editor of several books on molecular epidemiology and on p53. Pierre Hainaut is a Research Director at the International Prevention Research Institute. Amelie PlymothAmelie PlymothDr Amelie Plymoth, PhD, MPH (Karolinska Institutet (KI), Stockholm, Sweden) is an international scientist and university lecturer at KI who has worked in the field of molecular epidemiology, public health and surveillance in both high and low resource countries, in academia, the pharmaceutical industry, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) as well as the World Health Organization (WHO). She was born in Sweden where she received her PhD in Experimental Respiratory Medicine at Lund University in 2006. Her PhD thesis involved biomarker discovery for the respiratory disease Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). It was a joint collaboration between Lund University Hospital and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca R&D in Sweden. Dr Plymoth started out as a laboratory researcher and broadened her skills during PhD studies and postdocs to become an epidemiologist and public health specialist. It is a major strength of hers having a good understanding of diseases both from laboratory work and from field- and molecular epidemiological work. Dr Plymoth worked for three years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, which is part of WHO. At IARC she was instrumental in the initialization and management of the International Liver Cancer Study (ILCS) and worked on The Gambian Hepatitis Study (GHIS). Since 2010, Dr Plymoth has worked at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Institutet, where she has been part of designing and leading an etiologic study where the association between work-related exposures and infectious disease incidence is investigated. In the study they used, for the first time, their newly developed and extensively tested population-based system for infectious disease surveillance in an analytical epidemiological approach. It is the world's first truly population-based study where real-time collections of diagnostic specimens from the participants on 14 common viral respiratory viruses have been collected outside a study center. Her vision, for which the SWEDE-I study should be seen as a first pioneering effort, is to lay the foundation for a new avenue of research in epidemiology with the aim of reducing short-term absenteeism due to infections, and to increase the preparedness in the event of serious infectious threats and pandemics. Further, Dr Plymoth is continuing her molecular epidemiology work on liver cancer and has expanded it to include cancers of the upper digestive tract. During her research career Dr Plymoth has established international collaborations and networks, coordinated and managed international studies and networks; and worked in several research institutes around the world (Lund University in Sweden, Karolinska Institutet, University of California San Francisco, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Northeastern University in Boston, The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, the Medical Research Council in The Gambia and AstraZeneca R&D in Lund). Dr Plymoth has published several scientific articles, technical reports, book chapters, standard operating procedures and IARC monographs, served as guest editor, written and reviewed grant proposals, held oral conference presentations around the world; arranged conferences and workshops; and is chair of scientific education at the medical program at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.