Themed issue: New avenues in cancer prevention and treatment (BJP 75th Anniversary)

Cancer is defined as an uncontrolled growth of cells that are able to spread throughout the body. Although the definition sounds simple, many decades of research have shown the complexity of the disease. Experts report on cancer as a collection of diseases where cancers arising in a given organ or cell type are each considered a separate condition (Markham et al.,2020). Technological progress, including genomics and integration of artificial intelligence, has allowed us to learn more about cancers in unique patients and implies that even cancer of the same body site may have drastically different characteristics depending on a patient's genetic predispositions, acquired mutations and epigenetic aberrations, environmental exposures, lifestyle, age, weight, functions of other organs, gut microbiota composition and many other factors unique to every individual (Berger & Mardis,2018; Denny & Collins,2021; Klein et al.,2021;Smith et al.,2021; Xu et al.,2019).