LAUSR

In September 2018 Uta and Jing met in the Wiley Office for a strategy meeting. There, we started to plan for Biotechnology Journal’s first issue of 2019, as we know, one of our authors and readers’ favorite issues on “Methods and Advances”. This issue has been tailored with a collection of cutting-edge review highlights and research articles of important and emerging topics in the biotech field. The issue starts with a Perspective article by Sang Yup Lee et al., composed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, asking the question “Are We There Yet? How and When Specific Biotechnologies Will Improve Human Health”. The article is summarizing advances in gene editing, stem cell therapy, tissue engineering, precision medicine, and how they perform now and how they are expected to improve medical treatments in 20 years. A must-read article for everybody trying to understand why we need biotechnology research. Three further Reviews in this issue are related to medical biotech. Two of them are dealing with the hot topic of exosomes, which are also known as extracellular vesicles, in cancer research. Ki Soo Park and colleagues provide an overview on how exosomes can be used as diagnostic tools, since they could carry important biomarkers. Alessandro Sgambato and coworkers discuss “Progress and pitfalls in the methods of isolation and analysis” of extracellular vesicles in oncology, that is, the current challenges of methods used to find and isolate exosomes. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is considered as a puzzled disease associated with both genetic and non-genetic risk factors. Although considerable progress has been made in the clinical treatment of RA, the adaptive treatment tolerance (ATT) remains to be a major concern. Thus, Xing-Jie Liang and Weisheng Guo highlight current research of targeted stimuli-