Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Our new columns: Narrowing the distance between bench and bedside

The ‘News and Views’ section of Nature Medicine has a new look!

This month you’ll see we’ve introduced three new columns: Bedside to Bench, Bench to Bedside, and Community Corner. These columns are available this month without a subscription.

Cancer researchers Daniele Krause and Richard Van Etten anchor the new section with a ‘Bedside to Bench’ column examining how recent clinical trials hint at how to kill the cancer stem cell in certain blood disorders; eliminating this source of tumor cells has the potential to lead to improved cancer treatment. Their analysis exemplifies the goal of the new column: to examine the basic research implications of a recent clinical finding.

So far the response from the community has been positive about the ‘Bedside to Bench’ column. One of our readers, Evan Snyder, a physician-scientist at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, said he has initiated a seminar series with this same intent, examining how to develop testable hypotheses about basic science from clinical observations. We’d love to hear if others in the community have similar programs, or how they feel about this approach to asking the right scientific questions.

The other new column, ‘Bench to Bedside’ takes the more familiar route of examining the clinical implications of a basic research study. This month, Neil Shah complements Van Etten and Krause’s column by highlighting how resistance to chemotherapy develops in tumors deficient in the well-known cancer genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Shah takes the assignment to heart, examining in depth how patient treatment might change given this greater mechanistic understanding.

Our third column, ‘Community Corner’, scans a small segment of the research community for their response to a recent biomedical study—in this case two reports suggesting how environmental toxins might affect the development of autoimmunity. Experts with three different backgrounds each found something unique about the study.

To make room for the changes we have largely discontinued news and views on papers published outside of Nature Medicine. I’ve been wondering what to do with this format ever since, to my dismay, finding that Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology and Nature had all published a news and views on the same paper. A speaker at a conference—rightly, to my mind—mocked such excess. Since the launch of Nature Medicine more than ten years ago many other journals have begun to present commentaries on their strongest papers, particularly those with a biomedical slant. Although I like to think I provide superior editorial and screening functions as an editor, that is mostly vanity—-basically, with a click on a web browser you can find the commentary you need. In my mind, too much duplication risks redundancy and stretches the editorial resources of the scientific community.

Although we’ve dropped some news and views, we still have a duty to our readers to alert them to the hottest biomedical research in the previous month. So we’ve expanded our research highlights section to two pages, and added a short column highlighting papers within the Nature Publishing Group. One drawback to our process is that we rarely highlight papers that we have rejected, in order to avoid sending mixed signals to researchers who submit their papers. I must admit though, we do sometimes reject some interesting papers—often for reasons unrelated to their overall coolness, but for reasons nonetheless appropriate for our journal, such as a lack of mechanistic insight or poor in vivo data. So, these papers aside, I like to think we provide a quick snapshot in the research highlights section of the papers most relevant to that elusive beast dubbed ‘Translational Research.’

Our aim with the research highlights is to provide breadth in our coverage.

Our aim with the three new columns is to provide the depth—exploring the biomedical literature with quality synthesis.

We’d like your help in this venture. If you are a researcher who has formulated a testable, reasonable—and compelling—hypothesis about the mechanistic basis of disease, based on recent clinical findings, consider submitting a proposal for a ‘Bedside to Bench’ column. And if you get a chance to read the new columns, send us your feedback. This is a work in progress and we hope it develops in a way to best serve the biomedical community.

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