Prof. Dr. Masaharu Seno Appointed Associate Editor of Cancers

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Masaharu Seno has been appointed Associate Editor of Cancers (ISSN: 2072-6694). With an extensive background in scientific research and publishing, he will bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to this role.

Prof. Dr. Masaharu Seno is Head of the Laboratory of Cancer Stem Cell Engineering at the Faculty of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, and he is focused on finding new methods to treat this disease. “My research is focused on the development of innovative methods for cancer treatment,” says Seno. “Specifically, my group is using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to develop cancer stem cells (CSCs). Recently, we reported that cancer stem cells produced from iPS cells and embryonic stem cells, that then differentiate, are actually necessary for the maintenance of the cancer cells themselves. Understanding the mechanism governing the initiation and development of cancer will lead a major advance for the prevention and treatment of cancer.”

Prof. Dr. Seno points out that his group’s success lies in producing cancer stem cells from normal cell-derived iPS cells, which become tumorigenic when transplanted into nude mice, retaining stem cell-like properties without introducing foreign genes and/or intended mutations. “CSCs from normal cell derived iPSCs allow to provide not only various kinds of CSCs/cancer cells under different cancer-inducing niche but also with different genetic background and for experiments,” adds Prof. Dr. Seno. “We are thinking it possible to predict individual cancer cells, which could be subjected to find optimized and customized therapy for individuals using his/her iPSC-derived CSCs. Continuing this, the accumulation of different CSCs will become a library of CSCs/cancer cells, which should help the establishment of precision medicine for cancer treatment.”

In the future, Prof. Dr. Seno plans to form a consortium with industrial partners to manage cell libraries to develop CSC libraries. Coupled with omics technology, huge amounts of data will become available from these libraries, enabling the establishment of novel systems to evaluate agents “including those which were previously withdrawn by pharmaceutical companies after clinical trials” for cancer therapy.

This research on cancer is an extension of Prof. Dr. Seno’s expertise in the design of “functional physiologically and biologically active molecules such as growth factors, cytokines, nucleases and antibodies for medicine and public health”. Other projects include the development of highly efficient, in vivo drug delivery systems (DDSs) using nano-capsules of proteins or lipids to reduce side effects associated with conventional approaches; this is a novel procedure for profiling tissues and cells for DDSs.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Masaharu Seno, who shared his vision for the journal with us, as well as his views of the research area and open access publishing:

1. What appealed to you about the journal?
During the 200-year or even 100-year history of cancer research, many journals have been published that focus on the disease. However, the field of cancer science appears to have become more complicated than ever due to the development of modern molecular biotechnology that opened a new era of biological science half a century ago. Meanwhile, Cancers started with vol. 1 in 2009, almost 15 years ago, and it is headquartered in Basel, which is famous for Johannes Friedrich Miescher, who discovered Nuclein. I thought that Cancers was young and flexible enough to accept new ideas and concepts, advancing the field of cancer science with intriguing discussion without being affected by old-fashioned concepts.

2. What is your vision for the journal?
Cancer is still one of the controversial fields in science. My vision is to turn the journal into an up-to-date platform for scientific discussion distinguished from other journals in the cancer/oncology field to establish a new paradigm in cancer research, incorporating novel concepts of cancer.

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?
Due to the extensive development of information technology and networking systems, as well as artificial intelligence and computers themselves, the comprehensive analysis of experimental data, which are also available in a high-throughput manner, is growing rapidly. Many scientists are currently forced to choose a scientific approach based on either pure wet biology or in silico biology such as bioinformatics, while there are many obstacles to mastering the entire field. Scientists will have to be more thoughtful than ever, asking themselves whether they can understand the results of their analyses logically and objectively. It will become more important to be open-minded so that future scientists can gain the interdisciplinary knowledge required to collaborate with people in different fields. We can find such cases of collaboration in history such as the discovery of the DNA double-helix model by James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin (1953) and the proposal of the neuronal network model by Wallen S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943).

4. What do you think of the development of open access in the publishing field?
The problem of open access for the authors is usually the cost of publication, which is not always easy to pay for from their research budget. However, it is true that the papers published under open access are easy to read, resulting in the widespread propagation of their contents. I think it is being accepted as a good contemporary manner of publication because the system appears compromised by publishers and academic organizations making contracts with each of the supporting authors.

We warmly welcome our new Associate Editor, Prof. Dr. Masaharu Seno, and wish the journal every success in the future.