On another front, the ACR and A&R already have many collaborations with partners in South America, Africa, Asia and Europe. Manuscript submissions from Asia in particular are growing, so I anticipate building on that and making A&R an even more global journal. That includes continuing to work closely with Josef Smolen, editor of Annals of Rheumatic Diseases, which is the EULAR journal.
Beyond that, I would like to explore new ideas to get our readers to be more engaged with the journal through our website. One idea is to focus on engaging clinicians, including those who are in communities that don’t have an academic medical center. I am weighing options now, but it’s going to take me a couple months to get my feet wet before deciding what would have the most benefit.
TR: Thinking about the A&R audience and their interests, what do you see as the current hot topics?
Dr. Bridges: AI is a very hot topic right now. Everyone seems to include the words artificial intelligence or machine learning in their papers and their grant applications. However, unless a researcher uses correct assumptions and trains their models on the appropriate databasesthe findings might be difficult to interpret properly. That is also something we have to consider when reviewing manuscripts.
Another very hot topic is chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, which is seen as a huge advance for refractory disease, but the financial cost today is on the order of $1 million per patient. Yet another topic centers on the new technologies that allow us to see the DNA and RNA in the cells of diseased tissue: the genes they are expressing, the 3D models for transcriptomics. This allows a high level, broad view of disease processes that could ultimately have a big impact on advancing research that can be applied in the clinic.
These new technologies and therapies make this a fascinating time to be in research and clinical medicine, but at the same time, we need to put them in perspective in terms of how they can be used—and their results interpreted—to really change the lives of our patients. That is something A&R can facilitate by publishing manuscripts looking at long-term effects of novel interventions.
TR: How will the new editorial team at A&R approach that dual emphasis on the research and clinical sides?
Dr. Bridges: We have wide-ranging expertise on the editorial team. Our three deputy editors and three co-editors and I have complementary expertise. For example, Kenneth G. Saag, MD, MSc, my friend and colleague from UAB, will be one of the deputy editors, and he’s a clinical trialist, implementation scientist, and expert in gout and osteoporosis. [Editor’s note: Dr. Saag is UAB’s director of the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology, a position previously held by Dr. Bridges.]. Other deputy editors are Mariana J. Kaplan, MD, of NIH and Karen H. Costenbader, MD, MPH, of Brigham Mass General/Harvard Medical School.
