Editor’s Focus: Let’s talk about the C-word, shall we?

Like I just said in the headline, we need to talk about the C-word right now in the world of healthcare and life sciences. That’s right...the COVID-19 coronavirus!—actually, no, that’s not what I’m going to talk about.

Randy Willis, our features editor, talks about it in his commentary for this issue, and bless him for it. What he says is good and needs to be said. But I addressed this new coronavirus last month in my editorial (granted, things have gotten quite a bit more serious since then) and in the Late-Breaking News section and it shows up in multiple places the March issue in terms of commentary and news items (“Fighting COVID-19 effectively” in the Clinical Trials section and “Respiratory drug to start pilot clinical trial for coronavirus disease COVID-19 in China” in Late-Breaking News, for example—the best way to view those, particularly since the Late-Breaking News section isn’t uploaded to the website, is to view or download the PDF version of the March issue, which is here).

No, what I want to talk about is cancer.

It’s been said many times by me in this space and others that oncology is easily our most popular and most commonly covered area of therapeutics and diagnostics. And we have the AACR meeting coming up, too.

So, in that vein you have plenty of cancer-related stories in multiple news sections as always, plus a show preview feature on the AACR’s annual meeting starting on page 24 (there is talk the meeting might go virtual because of COVID-19 but as of the day I posted this editorial online it was still on a physical meeting) and a Focus Feature on cancer research news beginning on page 34. If you don’t have a physical issue or the PDF of the March issue you can click on the hotlinked text above and go to the online versions.

And if you’re not into cancer-related news there’s plenty more in this issue. The variety is particularly high in the Clinical Trials section this month, where we see a very rare occurrence: Not a single topic covered has more than one story representing it, and there is only one cancer-related story to be seen in that section. Don’t worry, the Focus Feature helps make up for that with clinical trial and other R&D news in the oncology arena.