Q&A on cancer research with Senior Editor Richard Hodge

We speak to Richard Hodge, a cancer editor at PLOS Biology about the new Collection “Unveiling cancer crosstalk across spatial and temporal scales”, his background in cancer research and his vision for cancer biology at the journal.

What is your role at PLOS Biology?

I am a Senior Editor at the journal, handling manuscripts across a range of topic areas, including cancer, which I share with my colleague Ines Alvarez-Garcia, as well as molecular biology, structural biology and biotechnology.

How did you become interested in cancer research?

I was a cancer researcher for both my student and post-doctoral stints in academia. During my PhD at King’s College London, I studied the roles of small GTPases in the metastatic dissemination of T cell leukemia. I was initially attracted to cancer research because its complexity presented a scientific challenge in trying to understand its mechanisms, as well as having a direct impact on patient outcomes. For my postdoc, I moved across the pond to the University of North Carolina, where I changed focus slightly to study the mechanistic roles of RAS proteins in the progression of pancreatic cancer. This is a time that I look back on with great fondness, as it was a period of excitement as the first KRAS G12C inhibitors started to arrive after years of frustration in trying to target RAS directly.

Tell us a bit about cancer research at PLOS Biology. What types of cancer research are you excited about?

PLOS Biology has a long-held reputation for being a respected and trusted journal. Open access science sits at the core of our mission, and we believe that publication in PLOS Biology can help to ensure the widespread dissemination of cancer research, ultimately improving patient outcomes. Consistent with this open mindset, we are increasingly considering manuscripts with ‘Portable Peer Review’, in which manuscripts are considered on the basis of reviews already received at other journals and preprint review servers to help streamline the editorial process. In addition, we are part of initiatives such as Review Commons, that help reduce serial rounds of review and ease the burden on reviewer pools. We also have a scooping protection policy that waives the novelty criteria for work submitted within six months of a similar study having been published in any journal.

Since my transition to an editorial role 6 years ago, I have watched and read from afar as the field has continued to evolve. During my student days, single-cell RNA-sequencing and CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing was in its infancy, and spatial transcriptomics was far away from being introduced. I look at the sorts of experiments being conducted now and I am astonished by their scope and complexity when I compare them to research from my heyday. It is clear that the rapid advancements in methodology have transformed the types of research questions that can be asked and the cancer field as a whole has fully embraced this technological wave. As one of the cancer editors at PLOS Biology, I would love to see more manuscripts in this field, and we would welcome the submission of primary research papers in cancer research that provide novel insights into the mechanisms that govern tumor progression and their relevance to therapeutic contexts.

Tell us a bit about the new Collection. What made you choose “Unveiling cancer crosstalk across spatial and temporal scales” as a theme?

The new Collection contains forward-looking review and comment articles in the cancer biology field, exploring cross-talk within the tumor microenvironment across both spatial and temporal scales. Personally, it has been fantastic to work on a topic that was the focus of my academic studies, and I have greatly enjoyed working with our Guest Editor Yibin Kang to shape its scope and themes.

Given the ever-changing technological landscape, we thought the time was right at PLOS Biology to take stock of how these emerging and increasingly accessible tools are redefining our fundamental understanding of tumor biology. The Collection spans a wide breadth of topics to reflect the multifaceted nature of tumor progression and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of cancer research. This includes metabolic reprogramming in the tumor microenvironment, neural innervation, multi-level evolutionary selection and the advent of AI-driven tumor models. We hope you find the articles interesting and that they provide food for thought as the field continues to progress forward.

What are your hopes for the future of the field?

The future of cancer biology is incredibly exciting, and we are unravelling tumor complexity at a faster rate than ever before. The rapid developments in AI will enable more accurate diagnosis and treatment predictions, and CRISPR genome editing could increasingly be applied to correct mutations that drive cancer development. These advances could therefore ultimately meet the long-held dream of personalized medicine, where treatments are specifically designed for each patient based on their cancer type and genetic makeup. One of the great joys of this job is keeping up with the progress of multiple different fields and watching how they develop over time. I will continue to keep up with the advances within the cancer crosstalk field with a keen interest!

About the author

Richard Hodge is a Senior Editor at PLOS Biology, based in Cambridge, UK. ORCID: 0000-0002-1920-1385 rhodge@plos.org