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EBioMedicineEBioMedicineEBioMedicine2352-3964Elsevier S2352-3964(18)30244-510.1016/j.ebiom.2018.07.005EditorialEBioMedicine: Translating Science to Improve Health EBioMedicine 22 7 2018 7 2018 22 7 2018 33 1 1 © 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.2018This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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Four years ago, EBioMedicine’s inaugural Editorial highlighted the worst Ebola outbreak in documented history in West Africa, which claimed the lives of 11,300 victims. The virus came back this year to the Democratic Republic of Congo, fortunately at a much smaller scale of outbreak; and this time an experimental vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, was administered to more than 3,300 people, covering all known contacts of confirmed Ebola cases as well as those people’s contacts. As of June 28, DR Congo Health Minister said the outbreak, after claiming 29 lives, appears to be under control with no further cases for 21 days now since the last confirmed case. The outbreak can be declared over if no new confirmed case occurs by July 19. The World Health Organization hailed rVSV-ZEBOV as a paradigm shift in the fight against Ebola. We see this as the culmination of many years of research on the basic life cycle of Ebola virus, as well as on vaccine immunogenicity and effectiveness. Among several other Ebola vaccine and drug approaches, the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine is an example of success that is already reaching end-users in the outbreak setting and getting closer to market authorisation.

Translating scientific knowledge to improve human health has been the motto of EBioMedicine since the launch of the journal, and will remain so as the journal becomes integrated into The Lancet group. The mission that we established for EBioMedicine in our inaugural Editorial still holds true – to serve both the clinical and basic translational research communities by offering a multimedia platform to facilitate dialogue where scientific ideas and clinical needs can be defined, experimentally explored, and ultimately solved. The integration of EBioMedicine into The Lancet group coincides with the launch of our new sister journal, EClinicalMedicine, which will have a complementary focus on medical research, clinical practice and health policy. Together, the two journals serve as The Lancet’s latest open access offering for quality research, covering the entire translational and clinical research spectrum.

EBioMedicine is also delighted to announce its first impact factor of 6.183, which is but one metric by which a journal’s quality and impact are measured. We are inspired by our growing community of authors who have chosen EBioMedicine as a home to publish and disseminate their best translational research, and by our readers who turn to the journal to hear about recent insights of relevance for advancing human health. An important part of our work is editorial outreach—attending research conferences and symposia, and visiting research institutes throughout the world. Through these direct interactions with the community, we hope to be able to stay informed about the translational research landscape, to hear what obstacles biomedical researchers are facing, and to identify what gaps need to be bridged in order to bring scientific insights closer to the clinic. Our mission remains closely aligned with our biomedical research community—to understand disease mechanisms, to identify potential therapeutic targets, and to translate those findings into clinical tools that can benefit patients. And those are the real metrics that matter to us.