In This Issue

We are pleased to present the 2012 Special Review Issue of Cell on Human Disease. The motivation for taking on this broad and complex topic came out of a discussion of how much has changed in the decade since our last special issue on human disease back in 2001, and how this deeper and richer understanding of biological basis of disease lays the groundwork for developing new treatments.Technical breakthroughs, such as high-throughput, sensitive DNA array hybridization and sequencing technologies, have enabled the detection of single-nucleotide polymorphisms and structural variants genome-wide across large sample sizes to reveal their associations with disease risk. Related technologies have meanwhile opened a window onto the complex populations of microbiota within us and their roles in health and disease. Advances in basic research—such as the achievement of induced pluripotency, understanding plasticity in T cell identity, and elucidating functions of noncoding RNAs—have opened new avenues for therapeutic development. In other cases, what was old is now new again. A decade ago, Otto Warburg's observations from the 1920s on the metabolic state of tumor cells had yet to be rediscovered by many cancer researchers.Reflecting on such seminal advances inspired us to coordinate this special issue, highlighting the exciting new biology and therapeutic strategies that have emerged from recent discoveries at the bench and in the clinic. We have tried to cover as many topics as possible while also recognizing the impossibility of achieving completeness in one issue. We thank the many authors and reviewers who contributed their expertise, time, and effort toward this collection. We hope that you will find the issue interesting and informative and that it will instill optimism and impetus for tackling the human biology challenges of the next decade