A decade of progress in cancer research

BMC Cancer was one of the first journals to be open access and exclusively published online. The journal published 20 articles during its first year and has steadily grown since then with over 490 articles already published this year. BMC Cancer now boasts an impact factor of 3.15, which places it in the first quartile of the "oncology" category. To celebrate this first very successful decade for the journal, we present a special series of commissioned articles that not only highlight the most important advances in cancer research over the last ten years, but also discuss the new developments we might expect to see in the near future.One major challenge in the treatment of cancer is to diagnose the disease at an early stage in order to improve prognosis. While several screening programmes exist for common cancers such as colorectal and breast cancer, they only detect cancers of one particular type [3,4]. In his commentary, Ian Cree [5] discusses how technical improvements in tests to detect circulating tumor markers, and indeed the potential for some molecules to act as general tumor markers, raise the possibility of blood test-based general screening for multiple cancers - in effect, screening for who to screen. Recently, an increasing number of studies have suggested that micro-RNAs (miRs) represent a promising new class of biomarkers for human malignancies [6-8]. In their review, Fei-Fei Liu and colleagues [9] specifically focus on the potential role of micro-RNAs as diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in human epithelial tumors.The last decade has also seen huge developments in sequencing technologies and several projects such as the Cancer Genome Atlas [10] and the International Cancer Genome Consortium [11] have aimed to provide a more complete picture of the mutational profile of cancer via large-scale analysis of cancer genomes. Hans Kristian Moen Vollan and Carlos Caldas [12] discuss how results of next generation sequencing hold the potential to refine mo