In any good relay race, the baton needs to be passed from one competent team member to the next. For the past 6 years Nature Reviews Cancer has been under the leadership of Ezzie Hutchinson, and in that time the journal has established itself as the number-one monthly review journal in oncology. With Ezzie's decision to pursue other aspects of her career, the baton has been passed to me, Nicola McCarthy, and my part in the race has just begun.

The ever-expanding list of technologies that are being applied to cancer research today, along with the trend towards 'translational research', means that any research project, whether in the laboratory or the clinic, is likely to cut across many areas of cancer cell biology. Undergraduates and principal investigators alike now need a broad knowledge of cancer biology, a reflection perhaps of the idea that the more we know, the more we have to understand. This is where, now more than ever since the launch of Nature Reviews Cancer, Reviews can make a big difference to our lives. By summarizing recent advances and introducing new concepts on the basis of recently published papers, Reviews and Perspectives can make that next set of experiments, or the latest grant application, slightly less daunting. These are just some of the aspects that the current team at Nature Reviews Cancer and I will be keeping in mind when commissioning future content for the journal.

Collections of recent Reviews on hot topics are another way of keeping up with the latest developments. The Nature Reviews Stem Cell Collection, Ezzie's final project for the Nature Reviews team, brings together recent Reviews and Perspectives on different aspects of stem cell biology. You can access it free online at http://www.nature.com/reviews/focus/stemcells (produced with support from Thermo Scientific).