Exploration of Digestive Diseases, where discovery and communication meet

Abstract

Discovery and scientific advances in our era have guided human progress and influenced our daily life like no other times in history. Besides making devices and countless gadgets that, in many cases, have revolutionized our lives, technology has become an essential tool for scientific breakthroughs in all fields of knowledge, including health sciences and biomedicine. This has been particularly relevant with the development of omics and sequencing (i.e. metabolomics, transcriptomics, single RNA-seq among many others), which have flooded our minds with an explosion of data in many fields of the biomedical arena, such as physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology or immunology and have translated in a substantial understanding of molecular pathways and mechanisms of disease [1,2]. Progress not only relies on science and technology but also requires dissemination and communication, following the words of Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, "If you can't communicate what you've been doing, your work is worthless". It is with these foundations that the journal Exploration of Digestive Diseases (EDD) has come to light with the aim to become a reference in the unveiling of scientific facts, education, and communication in digestive diseases. The content of EDD encompasses translational and basic research as well as clinical perspectives on liver, biliary, digestive tract, and pancreatic diseases, which affect millions of people globally. Indeed, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), an advanced stage of fatty liver disease, is the most common form of chronic liver diseases whose incidence is expected to keep rising due to its association with the obesity and metabolic syndrome epidemic. NASH, which is characterized by the confluence of steatosis, inflammation, and fibrosis, can progress to cirrhosis and liver cancer, the third leading cause of cancer death and the sixth most common cancer type worldwide [3]. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most frequent form of liver cancer and HCC incidence has tripled in the past 40 years, due to its