About Genes & Diseases

Genes & Diseases

Genes & Diseases is an open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal for molecular and translational medicine, published by KeAi — with publishing services by Elsevier — on behalf of Chongqing Medical University in Chongqing, China (online ISSN 2352-3042). Founded in September 2014, it was described by its sponsoring university as the first English-language journal to comprehensively combine molecular medicine with translational medicine, and it publishes research and reviews on genes and their roles in human disease: molecular genetics, gene therapy, cancer genetics, epigenetics, and the genetic mechanisms of neurological, metabolic and infectious diseases among them. Its editors-in-chief are Tong-Chuan He of the University of Chicago Medical Center and Ailong Huang of Chongqing Medical University — a Chongqing–Chicago partnership that has shaped the journal from its inaugural issue.

Founded in Chongqing in 2014

Chongqing Medical University records that Genes & Diseases was founded in September 2014 as an independent journal sponsored by the university. The inaugural issue opened with an editorial by Ailong Huang and Tong-Chuan He, “Genes & Diseases: Moving molecular and translational medicine forward,” welcoming readers to a peer-reviewed international journal that aimed to facilitate rapid dissemination and exchange of scientific advances about human diseases between basic science investigators and physicians worldwide. The founding editorial structure paired the two cities directly: He, at the University of Chicago Medical Center, served as editor-in-chief, with Huang, professor and vice-president of Chongqing Medical University, as deputy editor-in-chief and co-editor, and the university's president chairing the senior advisory board. The journal appears bimonthly — six issues a year — and its copyright is held by Chongqing Medical University, an ownership arrangement that has remained constant through its publishing changes.

KeAi, Elsevier and the publishing arrangement

The journal's current ScienceDirect listing states the arrangement precisely: copyright © Chongqing Medical University, publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. KeAi is the Beijing-based publishing company established jointly by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media, created to publish Chinese-owned English-language journals internationally; Chongqing Medical University's own account describes the journal as published by Elsevier, and earlier issues carried production and hosting by Elsevier on the university's behalf. The practical result is a journal that is institutionally Chinese and editorially binational, produced to international commercial standards and distributed on the ScienceDirect platform alongside Elsevier's medical list, while peer review remains formally under the responsibility of Chongqing Medical University.

Aims: the molecular bases of human disease

The journal defines itself as a journal for molecular and translational medicine that primarily focuses on publishing investigations on the molecular bases and experimental therapeutics of human diseases. Its fuller aims statement adds important qualifiers: it publishes rigorously peer-reviewed, high-quality original articles and authoritative reviews focused on the molecular bases of human disease, with emphasis on hypothesis-driven, mechanistic studies relevant to pathogenesis and/or experimental therapeutics. That emphasis distinguishes it from purely descriptive genetics. A catalogue of variants is not, by itself, the journal's core business; the work it seeks explains mechanism — how a gene, a regulatory change or a pathway produces disease — or tests an intervention that follows from that mechanism. Its authorship is worldwide, and its stated scope spans basic and translational biomedical research in molecular biology, molecular genetics and cell biology.

Scope: from epigenetics to regenerative medicine

The journal enumerates its scope in detail: cell proliferation and apoptosis; signal transduction; stem cell biology; developmental biology; gene regulation and epigenetics; cancer biology; immunity and infection; neuroscience; disease-specific animal models; gene and cell-based therapies; and regenerative medicine. Read as a map, that list traces the full arc of molecular medicine. At one end are the fundamental processes — proliferation, cell death, signalling, epigenetic control — whose disruption underlies most disease. In the middle are the disease arenas where those processes play out: cancer, infection and immunity, and diseases of the nervous system, together with the animal models that make them experimentally tractable. At the far end are the therapeutic responses the molecular understanding makes possible: gene therapy, cell-based therapy and regenerative approaches built on stem cell biology. The commissioning record for this profile highlights the same territory from the disease side — molecular genetics, gene therapy, cancer genetics, epigenetics, and genetic mechanisms of neurological, metabolic and infectious diseases — all of which fall squarely within the journal's published scope.

Article types and special issues

The journal publishes a wide range of formats: full-length research articles, review articles, short communications, correspondence, perspectives, commentary, views on news, research watch and research highlights, with its author guidance adding enabling and emerging technologies, clinical and translational investigations, rapid communications and letters. The shorter formats do specific work in a fast-moving field: commentary and research highlights analyse notable papers — in this journal or elsewhere — while views on news connects the research literature to developments of immediate interest. The journal also develops themed special issues through calls for papers; recent calls listed on its site include an issue on artificial intelligence applications in disease pathogenesis and precision medicine, and one on AI-enabled functional genomics and multi-omics for precision medicine, with submission deadlines running into 2026 and 2027 — a sign of where its editors see molecular medicine moving, toward integrated omics data interpreted computationally and applied to individualised treatment.

Open access since 2023

Although the journal was freely available in its early years through Elsevier's hosting, it formalised its model with an announcement in December 2022: from January 2023, Genes & Diseases became an open-access journal in the full sense — authors pay an article publishing charge, listed at US$3,000, have a choice of licence options and retain copyright in their published work, while the journal continued with the same aims and scope, editorial team, submission system and rigorous peer review. Papers submitted on or before 31 December 2022 were published without charge. Authors may pay the charge in US dollars or Chinese renminbi, a practical detail reflecting the journal's large Chinese author base alongside its international one. The journal's content is available through PubMed Central, which gives its molecular medicine a permanent, freely searchable archive in the main repository of the biomedical literature — significant for a title whose readership includes clinicians as well as laboratory scientists.

Indexing, first impact factor and growth

Genes & Diseases is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus — as the commissioning record notes — and its abstracting and indexing listings also include Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, Current Contents/Life Sciences and Embase. Chongqing Medical University announced in 2019, following its inclusion in the Science Citation Index, that the journal had received its first impact factor, 4.803 in the 2019 Journal Citation Report released in June 2020 by Clarivate, ranking in the first quartile globally in both Genetics & Heredity and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. Later listings show substantial further growth: the 2020 impact factor was recorded at 7.103, and ScienceDirect's current journal comparison lists an impact factor of 14.6 with a CiteScore of 10.4. Whatever weight a reader places on such metrics, the trajectory — first quartile at first assessment, then a climb into double figures — is the standard evidence that the journal's founding bet, that a Chongqing-sponsored English journal could compete internationally in molecular medicine, has paid off.

Chongqing's journal of molecular medicine

Chongqing is one of China's great medical cities, and Chongqing Medical University is its principal medical university; Genes & Diseases is the university's flagship English-language research journal and a deliberate instrument of its internationalisation. The journal is published in alliance with the Association of Chinese Americans in Cancer Research, in addition to its Chicago editorial link — connections that tie it into the Chinese-American biomedical research community through which much of its early authorship and editorship flowed. In a directory of Chinese magazines and journals, it represents a now-familiar but still striking pattern: a regional medical university founding, owning and sponsoring an English-language journal, partnering with KeAi and Elsevier for production and reach, and — within a decade of its September 2014 founding — holding first-quartile standing in its categories and a double-figure impact factor, without moving an inch from Chongqing.