About Precision Cancer Medicine

Precision Cancer Medicine

Precision Cancer Medicine (abbreviated PCM; cited as Precis Cancer Med; ISSN 2617-2216) is an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal launched in 2018 by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong, with support from Wolters Kluwer. It is the official journal of Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center (FUSCC) in Shanghai, and it is dedicated to the precise diagnosis and treatment of cancers and to personalised care for patients — matching treatment to the molecular character of an individual tumour rather than to its site of origin alone. Its editors-in-chief are drawn from the leadership of its host cancer centre. Its official website is pcm.amegroups.org.

What "precision" means in this journal's title

The journal's founding foreword, "Precision cancer medicine: deliver a lasting blow to cancer!", framed its subject with an analogy its editors drew from Chinese medicine itself: just as treatment based on syndrome differentiation tailors therapy to the individual patient, precision cancer medicine aims to provide new knowledge regarding the pathogenesis of cancer in order to more precisely target therapy. The journal's own review of its host centre's experience puts the narrower definition plainly: precision cancer medicine focuses on revealing the genetics of cancer and then treating it with targeted drugs, considering the optimal medication for each patient. PCM was founded to give that approach an international platform for academic and practitioner discussion, furthering understanding of the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and recovery management of cancer care, and aiming to advance both the science and the practice of cancer research and clinical trials.

The official journal of Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center

PCM is the official journal of Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, and that institution's history is part of the journal's own record. The centre traces its history to the Sino-Belgian Radium Institute established on 1 March 1931, the earliest specialised hospital of oncology in China, and the journal's about page describes it as engaged in clinical practice, medical education, oncological research and cancer prevention in China. The scale recorded there for 2017 — 1,339,000 outpatient and emergency visits including more than 160,000 first visits, 37,284 surgeries and 76,381 hospitalisations, with 338 SCI papers published in journals such as the Journal of Clinical Oncology and Nature — indicates the clinical base from which the journal's host institution speaks. FUSCC's recorded sister-institution partnerships include MD Anderson Cancer Center, the National University Cancer Institute Singapore, Institut Gustave Roussy, Duke Cancer Institute and the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, part of the international network into which the journal was launched.

Editors from the centre's leadership

The journal's founding editorial team came from FUSCC itself. The foreword's conflict-of-interest statement records that Zhimin Shao served as the journal's unpaid executive editor-in-chief and Xiaomao Guo as its unpaid editor-in-chief. Guo, a professor, chief physician and doctoral tutor, was director of Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center and director of the Shanghai Proton and Heavy Ion Hospital — China's first medical institution equipped with proton and heavy ion therapy equipment, which had launched about ten prospective clinical studies in that field — and his interview in the journal set out why gene- and omics-based testing and big data analysis were needed to identify which patients suit conventional therapies and which suit targeted or proton and heavy ion therapies. He also stated that FUSCC was partnering with AME Publishing Company to launch the peer-reviewed English journal Precision Cancer Medicine as an international exchange platform and a stepping stone for the hospital towards becoming a first-class cancer centre in Asia. Shao, of the centre's Department of Breast Surgery and its Fudan University Cancer Institute and Breast Cancer Institute, represents the surgical and breast-oncology side of the precision programme the journal documents.

Scope: the whole chain of cancer care, by multidisciplinary teams

With the aim of better understanding and management of cancers, the journal focuses on precision cancer research on different kinds of cancers and different aspects of cancer research, encompassing advanced basic research, translational research and up-to-date clinical practice in precision medicine. It explicitly engages multidisciplinary teams — oncology, pathology, imaging, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, surgery, anaesthesiology and nursing among them — and it aims to improve healthcare across all aspects of prevention, diagnosis, treatment and recovery management. That full-chain framing distinguishes PCM from journals organised around a single treatment modality: a biomarker study, an imaging advance, a surgical series and a recovery protocol can all fall within its remit provided each bears on treating the individual patient's cancer more precisely. It welcomes Original Articles, Review Articles, Editorials, Editorial Commentaries, Case Reports and Clinical Guidelines.

The host centre's precision programme, in the journal's pages

The journal has carried detailed accounts of the precision programme of its own host institution. Its review "Precision cancer medicine in China: the Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center experience" records that FUSCC insists research in this field should be a closed-loop system starting from patients — clinical problems — and ending with patients, in clinical practice. Based on its multi-omic triple-negative breast cancer cohort, the centre proposed the Fudan Subtyping System, dividing triple-negative breast cancer into four molecular subtypes: luminal androgen receptor (LAR), immunomodulatory (IM), basal-like immune-suppressed (BLIS) and mesenchymal-like (MES). To test targets identified by data mining in each subtype, the centre launched FUTURE, a phase Ib/II, open-label umbrella study evaluating multiple targeted treatments in patients with refractory metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. The same review is candid that precision practice in China still faces setbacks, while recording that in top centres such as FUSCC, where precision resources are more abundant, prognoses have approximately equalled international advanced standards.

Special series as the journal's organising device

Much of PCM's content is organised into commissioned special series, each gathering articles on one precision problem. The series "Eastern and Western Perspectives on Precision Cancer Medicine" carried the FUSCC experience review above. The series "How to Detect and Treat NSCLC Patients with Oncogenic Fusions" carried a 2024 review marking sixteen years since ALK rearrangements were identified as driver events in non-small cell lung cancer in 2007, tracing how targeting ALK became a model of precision oncology, together with a companion review of genetic and non-genetic resistance mechanisms in lung cancers harbouring non-ALK oncogenic fusions. Other series visible in its record include "Precision Oncology in Urogenital and Gynecological Tumors", which carried a scoping review of BRCA mutations in genitourinary and gynaecologic tumours and the role of PARP inhibitors, and "Lung Cancer in Women: From Epidemiology to Therapy", which carried a narrative review of sex and gender differences in lung cancer epidemiology and prevention. An editorial in the journal, "Sharing data: a requirement for expanding precision oncology", addressed the data-sharing infrastructure — open resources such as cBioPortal and COSMIC — on which molecular treatment decisions depend.

Indexing and metrics: a Scopus-listed title

Unlike several sister journals from the same publisher, PCM's own about page lists a deliberately short indexing record: it is indexed and covered by Scopus and Google Scholar. SCImago's Scopus-derived data records coverage from 2018, an h-index of 10, and subject classifications across oncology, surgery, pharmacology (medical), anaesthesiology and pain medicine, oncology nursing and cancer research, mostly at third-quartile level with cancer research at fourth quartile. AME's portfolio-wide CiteScore announcement gave Precision Cancer Medicine a 2024 CiteScore of 2.1, ranking it 269th of 568 journals in surgery (second quartile), 275th of 415 in oncology, 14th of 22 in oncology nursing, 183rd of 233 in cancer research, 179th of 275 in pharmacology (medical) and 69th of 139 in anaesthesiology and pain medicine — a spread that mirrors the multidisciplinary scope the journal claims for itself.

Editorial standards and author process

PCM is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows COPE's guidelines, the ICMJE recommendations and WAME guidance; its author instructions were updated on 16 January 2026. Manuscripts must be the original work of the authors and not under consideration elsewhere. All content is published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), free to read, download, copy and distribute on those terms, with copyright transferred to AME Publishing Company under an exclusive licensing agreement that preserves authors' sharing and scholarly usage rights. The journal states turnaround times of one to three weeks for in-house review, one to three months for external peer review, publication ahead of print within one month of acceptance once the article processing charge is received, and formal publication within one to three months, with original articles prioritised. Its editorial office is reachable at pcm@amegroups.com. Article volumes in recent years have been modest by the standards of large oncology titles, and readers should treat the journal as a focused, series-driven title rather than a high-volume one.

Place in the field

Precision Cancer Medicine is defined by two things: a concept — treatment matched to tumour genetics — and an institution, China's earliest specialist cancer centre, whose own subtyping systems, umbrella trials and proton and heavy ion programme it documents. Launched in 2018 as FUSCC's official journal and its intended international exchange platform, indexed in Scopus with a 2024 CiteScore of 2.1, it remains the AME title in which the promise in its name is tested against the practice of the centre that sponsors it.