Pharmacogenomics has become an increasingly important area of biomedical sciences and our stated editorial goal is to be a catalyst for the field, bringing to the community original research, along with informative overviews of the latest developments in our field.

But what is the state of the art in the field of pharmacogenomics? At this point the field is saturated with discussions of promise and possibility, when what we are all really looking forward to is conclusive data that permit the assessment of whether genomics can indeed impact on therapeutics. We are particularly interested in the identification of the effects of drugs at the genomic level and on the use of genomic markers to predict treatment response. It is encouraging for us that since our launch 10 months ago, interesting results in these areas are being submitted to and published in The Pharmacogenomics Journal. We continue to emphasize the cross-disciplinary nature of this field, and for this reason encourage submissions of pharmacogenomic investigation in all areas of medicine, as well as related technological and methodological advances that can substantially impact on future research. Our editorial goals of rapid and rigorous peer review, followed by rapid publication will continue to facilitate publication of the latest developments in the field.

In addition to the latest research results, key technical issues are of interest to us. Those include criteria for choice of SNPs in pharmacogenomic studies, methods for analysis of the large amounts of data generated by current research, and discussions of the types of validation studies needed to achieve conclusive results in this field.

As of the end of last year, we have offered and encouraged authors to submit their manuscripts via the web (http://mts-tpj.nature.com). This is a web-based tool designed for manuscript submission, peer review, and tracking. It requires no special software and has been developed for ease of use; authors just need to follow the instructions provided on the website. This new system has several benefits:

  1. 1

    For authors submitting articles there is the ease and flexibility of submission, faster turnaround by use of the internet for transmitting information that previously relied on express courier or the mail system. Moreover, authors can also track the progress of their manuscripts through the peer review process

  2. 2

    For reviewers, this system offers reliable web-based access to the relevant reviewer materials, including article and forms, while also making it easy to communicate comments back to the editor

I would encourage you go to the journal's home page (http://www. nature.com/tpj) in order to read more about submitting online. Please note that even though we prefer submissions to be made online, authors can still submit printed copies of their articles to our Editorial Offices (see the bottom of the left hand column on this page).

We believe that the use of the web for submissions and peer review will make it easier to receive and process manuscripts, thereby expediting the peer review process. This will further contribute to our mission to optimally serve the pharmacogenomics community by publishing the latest and most important developments in this exciting new field.

Julio Licinio, MD